Chase Davis has an interesting entry on his blog car-case.net related to how he did a two-hour DM project at his paper in Colombia, MO.

3/28/2006
Data mining: a starting point

Data mining is hard. Neural networks,decision trees – it’s a lot to chew, especially without the propertraining most of us lack. But paging through books, running failedexperiments and dealing with the associated headaches lately got me thinking: How do journalists get in on the ground floor?If data mining is the automated extraction of useful and previously unknown information from large datasets,maybe it is simply an extension of automation – a way of abstractingand scheduling searches that tap into continuous streams of data andgive reporters information they can use.  (more)