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| Knight funding expands IRE’s journalist-friendly Census site Posted: 03 Oct 2012 07:42 AM PDT Census data can be a beautiful thing, but it can also be the bane of your existence. At one point or another, most journalists have tried to wade into the U.S. Census website or Census.IRE.org.
The site is fairly straightforward, allowing users to browse data by state, county, place, and drill down from there into age, race, gender and other factors. On top of being a searchable database, the site is also a data repository. If you’re building something of your own, the numbers are available for download in different formats. Census data plays a very important role in most newsrooms, either providing baseline demographic information for stories or powering news apps and data visualizations. But for many newsrooms, the task of finding that data and putting it in a useful format can be a difficult. It’s also a process that has a disproportionate effect on newsrooms. Larger publishers may be more likely to have a team to work specifically on data; smaller publishers would have to pull people off other projects or skip it entirely. That’s one of the main reasons Germuska and a group of news developers from The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, and more built the first Census site for Investigative Reporters and Editors, which uses numbers from the 2010 Census. “Based on anecdotal experience in the journalist world, we built something people found pretty handy,” he said.
Keefe said the reason the site caught on with newsrooms was ease of use. Having simple navigation means a reporter on deadline can find what they need fast, and they’re likely to come back, he said. “I’m just a huge admirer-slash-user of the existing site,” Keefe said. For him, the best feature is the cleaned-up, formatted data for download, which can be fed directly into apps or maps WNYC is working on. One thing data journalists especially appreciate about the site is that it allows for comparisons between 2000 and 2010 Census numbers, which requires adjusting for changes in Census tracts, Keefe said. “These guys are journalists who use this data, have used the data, and understand what they need at the end of it,” he said. The Census site fits a lot of the criteria Knight has outlined in the data challenge. It’s an existing project that builds on established data. It’s also targeted for an audience that could range from journalists to data scientists or people within a given community. But the site was built specifically with journalists in mind, Germuska told me. That meant the team exercised some editorial judgement in the design, knowing what things journalists look for and what they typically don’t need. “For software development work, we try to have a clear idea of who is going to use the tool and look at all the choices we make and assess them from that,” Germuska said. Census.IRE.org is just one of several News Challenge projects past and present that have brought together developers from various news organizations to work on something for the broader industry. Germuska said data journalists are open to sharing code in order to see what others can do with it. While there can be a competition to break stories on the reporting side, the push is towards collaboration on the data desk, he said. The goals of data journalism apps like Census.IRE.org is to facilitate better journalism no matter who’s doing it, he said. “At the end of the day it feels like it should be possible to say ‘I care about this place, let me go get the Census data about this place,’” he said. |
| While Apple and Google bicker, Knight invests in open maps Posted: 03 Oct 2012 06:57 AM PDT
September was a big month for maps: Amazon released its own Maps API to challenge Google’s hegemony. Apple, locked in a corporate feud with Google, dropped Google Maps in favor of a homegrown solution for iOS 6 (with disastrous results). Meanwhile, the Knight Foundation put its money and might behind maps owned by no corporation: OpenStreetMap. Like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap is a map that anyone can edit. The data comes from volunteers who use GPS devices or just local knowledge to map their environments. If you want to fix a mistake, just hit the ubiquitous “Edit” button. The site’s existing user interface is clunky and unfriendly, however. Knight awarded a $575,000 News Challenge grant to OSM developer MapBox to refine that user interface and develop new APIs to make the data easily exportable. “What’s critical about OpenStreetMap is not the map. It’s the data,” said MapBox CEO Eric Gundersen at the ONA conference in San Francisco. The map you see at openstreetmap.org is purposely ugly, a visual wrapper around the wealth of data underneath. “The power of OpenStreetMap is the power of grabbing that data out and doing stuff with it,” he said. MapBox, a for-profit company, has built very pretty maps with OSM data. The company’s highly customizable mapping platform is used by The New York Times, NPR, The Boston Globe, and Foursquare. Gundersen had me visit the site, create an account, and look up my old San Diego address. He watched as I worked. I saw that the street name was listed incorrectly, so I went to fix it. The Flash-based interface was pretty rough, but I figured it out. It was gratifying to correct a detail I knew to be wrong; you can’t do that on an iPhone. People like Gundersen believe data is better if anyone can contribute — and everyone owns it. "It's not all about buying data. It's not all about driving cars around," he said, referring to Google’s ubiquitous Street View vehicles. "It's about building a community around data. Google gets that, and that's why they made Map Maker. The difference here is, Who owns that data? You don't." The Knight Foundation has previously funded mapping projects focused on the end user, such as Stamen Maps and TileMill. In this case, Knight is drilling beneath the presentation layer and investing in the data underneath — fitting for the data round of the Knight News Challenge. “The big part of the investment is making it easier to get data out, so it’s more consumable,” Gundersen said. He wants to see news organizations ordinary users creating their own projects with OSM data. MapBox will create more intuitive, low-level APIs to help introduce new developers to the community. Gundersen said he expects the bulk of the new OpenStreetMap tools to be launched in spring 2013. All of the code will be open-sourced and posted to GitHub. |
Now the project is getting an additional boost from the Knight Foundation. A winner in the data round of the Knight News Challenge, Census.IRE.org will expand its set of tools and add more data thanks to $450,000 in new funding. “With Knight giving us more money, we can take the basic idea and do it a little more fully,” said 
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