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Tom Johnson

Shorenstein Center paper argues for collaboration in investigative reporting | Harvard ... - 0 views

  • Shorenstein Center paper argues for collaboration in investigative reporting Thursday, June 2, 2011 Sandy Rowe, former editor of The Oregonian, and Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center fall 2010 and spring 2011. Photograph by Martha Stewart Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School Contact: Janell Simsjanell_sims@harvard.eduhttp://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/index.html Media organizations may be able to perform their watchdog roles more effectively working together than apart. That is one conclusion in a new paper, “Partners of Necessity: The Case for Collaboration in Local Investigative Reporting,” authored by Sandy Rowe, former editor of Portland’s The Oregonian. The paper is based on interviews and research that Rowe conducted while serving as a Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Rowe’s research examines the theory underpinning collaborative work and shows emerging models of collaboration that can lead to more robust investigative and accountability reporting in local and regional markets. “Growing evidence suggests that collaborations and partnerships between new and established news organizations, universities and foundations may be the overlooked key for investigative journalism to thrive at the local and state levels,” Rowe writes. “These partnerships, variously and often loosely organized, can share responsibility for content creation, generate wider distribution of stories and spread the substantial cost of accountability journalism.” Rowe was editor of The Oregonian from 1993 until January 2010. Under her leadership, the newspaper won five Pulitzer Prizes including the Gold Medal for Public Service. Rowe chairs the Board of Visitors of The Knight Fellowships at Stanford University and is a board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists. From 1984 until April 1993, Rowe was executive editor and vice president of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Virginian-Pilot won the Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting under her leadership. Rowe’s year-long fellowship at the Shorenstein Center was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Read the full paper on the Shorenstein Center’s website.
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    Shorenstein Center paper argues for collaboration in investigative reporting Thursday, June 2, 2011 Sandy Rowe, former editor of The Oregonian, and Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center fall 2010 and spring 2011. Photograph by Martha Stewart Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School Contact: Janell Sims janell_sims@harvard.edu http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/index.html Media organizations may be able to perform their watchdog roles more effectively working together than apart. That is one conclusion in a new paper, "Partners of Necessity: The Case for Collaboration in Local Investigative Reporting," authored by Sandy Rowe, former editor of Portland's The Oregonian. The paper is based on interviews and research that Rowe conducted while serving as a Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Rowe's research examines the theory underpinning collaborative work and shows emerging models of collaboration that can lead to more robust investigative and accountability reporting in local and regional markets. "Growing evidence suggests that collaborations and partnerships between new and established news organizations, universities and foundations may be the overlooked key for investigative journalism to thrive at the local and state levels," Rowe writes. "These partnerships, variously and often loosely organized, can share responsibility for content creation, generate wider distribution of stories and spread the substantial cost of accountability journalism." Rowe was editor of The Oregonian from 1993 until January 2010. Under her leadership, the newspaper won five Pulitzer Prizes including the Gold Medal for Public Service. Rowe chairs the Board of Visitors of The Knight Fellowships at Stanford University and is a board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists. From 1984 until April 1993, Rowe was executive editor and vice president of The Virginian-Pi
Tom Johnson

Corporate Accountability Data in Influence Explorer - Sunlight Labs: Blog - 0 views

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    Again, US-centric, but this might generate some ideas of what could be accomplish in your city/nation. Late yesterday we announced a bunch of new features for Influence Explorer: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/ie-corporate-accountability/ As the blog post explains, you can now find information about a corporation's EPA violations, federal advisory committee memberships, and participation in the rulemaking process -- all in one place. I wanted to highlight that last feature a bit more, though. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the full corpus of public comments submitted to regulations.gov has been available for bulk download and analysis. This isn't a coincidence: regulations.gov is built using technologies that make scraping it unusually difficult. This is unfortunate, since everyone seems to agree that federal rulemakings are gaining in importance -- both because of congressional gridlock that leaves the regulatory process as a second-best option, and because of calls to simplify the regulatory landscape as a pro-growth measure. It's an area where influence is certainly exerted -- rulemakers are obliged to review every comment -- but little attention is paid to who's flooding dockets with comments, and which directions rules are being pushed. It's taken us several months to develop a reliable solution and to obtain past rulemakings, but we now have the data in hand. We plan to do much more with this dataset, and we're hoping that others will want to dig in, too. You can find a link to the bulk download options in the post above -- the full compressed archive of extracted text and metadata is ~16GB, but we've provided options for grabbing individual agencies' or dockets' data. If anyone wants the original documents (PDFs, DOCs, etc) we can talk through how to make that happen, but as they clock in at 1.5TB we'll want to make sure folks know what they're getting into before we spend the time and bandwidth. Finally, note that we currently o
Tom Johnson

Public sector needs to improve quality of information, warns Eurim | Guardian Governmen... - 0 views

  • Public sector needs to improve quality of information, warns Eurim Parliamentary group gives cautious welcome to the EU's plans to open up more public sector data reddit this omnitracker.omniTrackEVarEvent( 12, 16, 'Guardian Government Computing: Reddit', 'click', '.reddit a' ); Comments (0) Sade Laja Guardian Professional, Monday 19 December 2011 07.08 EST Article history Sharing data on public services could have serious consequences unless the material has been valued, maintained and protected and the original reasons for its collection have been taken into account, the Information Society Alliance (Eurim), has warned. In a report on the quality of public sector information, the group says that the drive to put central and local government data online, open to public scrutiny, has revealed the long standing problems with quality that lie behind the reluctance of some departments and agencies to trust one another's data. It adds that it is important that decisions on spending cuts are based on good quality information.
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    Sharing data on public services could have serious consequences unless the material has been valued, maintained and protected and the original reasons for its collection have been taken into account, the Information Society Alliance (Eurim), has warned. In a report on the quality of public sector information, the group says that the drive to put central and local government data online, open to public scrutiny, has revealed the long standing problems with quality that lie behind the reluctance of some departments and agencies to trust one another's data. It adds that it is important that decisions on spending cuts are based on good quality information.
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    An important article. Please read.
Tom Johnson

The Overview Project » Using Overview to analyze 4500 pages of documents on s... - 0 views

  • Using Overview to analyze 4500 pages of documents on security contractors in Iraq by Jonathan Stray on 02/21/2012 0 This post describes how we used a prototype of the Overview software to explore 4,500 pages of incident reports concerning the actions of private security contractors working for the U.S. State Department during the Iraq war. This was the core of the reporting work for our previous post, where we reported the results of that analysis. The promise of a document set like this is that it will give us some idea of the broader picture, beyond the handful of really egregious incidents that have made headlines. To do this, in some way we have to take into account most or all of the documents, not just the small number that might match a particular keyword search.  But at one page per minute, eight hours per day, it would take about 10 days for one person to read all of these documents — to say nothing of taking notes or doing any sort of followup. This is exactly the sort of problem that Overview would like to solve. The reporting was a multi-stage process: Splitting the massive PDFs into individual documents and extracting the text Exploration and subject tagging with the Overview prototype Random sampling to estimate the frequency of certain types of events Followup and comparison with other sources
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    Using Overview to analyze 4500 pages of documents on security contractors in Iraq by Jonathan Stray on 02/21/2012 0 This post describes how we used a prototype of the Overview software to explore 4,500 pages of incident reports concerning the actions of private security contractors working for the U.S. State Department during the Iraq war. This was the core of the reporting work for our previous post, where we reported the results of that analysis. The promise of a document set like this is that it will give us some idea of the broader picture, beyond the handful of really egregious incidents that have made headlines. To do this, in some way we have to take into account most or all of the documents, not just the small number that might match a particular keyword search. But at one page per minute, eight hours per day, it would take about 10 days for one person to read all of these documents - to say nothing of taking notes or doing any sort of followup. This is exactly the sort of problem that Overview would like to solve. The reporting was a multi-stage process: Splitting the massive PDFs into individual documents and extracting the text Exploration and subject tagging with the Overview prototype Random sampling to estimate the frequency of certain types of events Followup and comparison with other sources
Tom Johnson

SpeakerText | Transcription, Captions, Interactive Transcripts - 0 views

  • How It Works SpeakerText combines artificial and human intelligence to offer low-cost, high-quality video transcription. Sign up for an account Import your video library (we currently support Ooyala, Brightcove, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Wistia and Blip.tv), or add your videos one-by-one. Choose which videos you want to transcribe. Check out and pay. SpeakerText sends you an email when your transcripts are finished. Download your transcripts as text or XML files from SpeakerText OR install CaptionBox and download your transcripts as HTML code to place on your website. We guarantee that your transcripts will get back to you in less than 72 hours and be of the highest quality. Give it a try now!
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    How It Works SpeakerText combines artificial and human intelligence to offer low-cost, high-quality video transcription. Sign up for an account Import your video library (we currently support Ooyala, Brightcove, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Wistia and Blip.tv), or add your videos one-by-one. Choose which videos you want to transcribe. Check out and pay. SpeakerText sends you an email when your transcripts are finished. Download your transcripts as text or XML files from SpeakerText OR install CaptionBox and download your transcripts as HTML code to place on your website. Guarantee We guarantee that your transcripts will get back to you in less than 72 hours and be of the highest quality. Give it a try now! http://speakertext.com
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    This is the first I've heard of a tool like this doing a creditable job. I suspect there is some machine transcription going on, but then the first pass is sent to India or Jamaica to be polished. Here's an example of how the NYTimes used this tool: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/20/us/politics/20090120_INAUGURAL_ANALYSIS.html
Tom Johnson

8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users | ... - 0 views

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    8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users Craig Silverman by Craig Silverman Published Apr. 27, 2012 7:46 am Updated Apr. 27, 2012 9:23 am Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks. This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members. For example, lots of people talk about how Andy Carvin does crowdsourced verification and turns his Twitter feed into a real time newswire. Lost in the discussion is the fact that Carvin also develops sources and contacts on the ground and stays in touch with them on Skype and through other means. What you see on Twitter is only one part of the process. Some things never go out of style. At the same time, there are new tools, techniques and approaches every journalist should have in their arsenal. Fortunately, several leading practitioners of what I sometimes call the New Verification are gracious and generous about sharing what they know. One such generous lot are the folks at Storyful, a social media curation and verification operation that works with clients such as Reuters, ABC News, and The New York Times, among others. I wrote about them last year and examined how in some ways they act as an outsourced verification service for newsrooms. That was partly inspired by this post from Storyful founder Mark Little: I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we c
Tom Johnson

cohuman collaboration tool - 0 views

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    Who uses Cohuman? Teams Leads Members Teams Cohuman is ideal for any group of people that needs to communicate more dynamically and effectively than email or traditional collaboration tools will allow. Startups, Distributed Teams, Small Businesses, Deal Teams, Departments in larger organizations... in short Cohuman is for any group that requires a solution designed to coordinate people and manage projects more intelligently. Clear Task Ownership Assigning and tracking tasks is unambigious. Each team member has their personal responsibilities defined. Transparent Communication Everyone on the team knows exactly who is doing what - without extra effort. Intelligent Prioritization Every Task is ranked by Cohuman from the team's inputs in order of priority for people and projects so the important Tasks get done first. Dynamic Updates If a Task priority changes, the information is shared automatically with each team member - no Status update meetings or emails required. Powerful Email Integration Cohuman works for everyone on your team. Even those without a Cohuman account can interact with Cohuman via their email.
Tom Johnson

Politilines - 0 views

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    Visualizing the words used in the 2011-2012 Republican Primary debates. The method: We collected transcripts from the American Presidency Project at UCSB, categorized them by hand, then ranked lemmatized word-phrases (or n-grams) by their frequency of use. Word-phrases can be made of up to five words. Our ranking agorithm accounts for things such as exclusive word-phrases - meaning, it won't count "United States" twice if it's used in a higher n-gram such as "President of the United States." While still in beta, the mini-app is responsive and easy to use. The next challenge, I think, is to really show what everyone talked about. For example, click on education and you see Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry brought those up. Then roll over the names to see the words each candidate used related to that topic. You get some sense of content, but it's still hard to decipher what each actually said about education.
Tom Johnson

Investigative Reporters and Editors | Listserv archives - 0 views

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    Listserv archives IRE and NICAR offer several opportunities for members and even non-members to exchange ideas, information, techniques and war stories. Joining is easy. If you are an IRE member, you may view the list archives: * Click an archive link and login with any e-mail address on record with the IRE office. Click "Get Password" if your first visit, to receive your LISTSERV password (separate from the IRE website password). Most users will login with the e-mail used for their IRE login account. Please e-mail listmaster@ire.org if you need help or have any questions. IRE-L archives. NICAR-L archives. IREPLUS-L archives. CENSUS-L archives. The following lists are less active: CFIC-L archives IRE-EDU-L archives IREBC-L archives
Tom Johnson

flare | visualization on the web - 0 views

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    Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java.
Tom Johnson

Submishmash: Submission Manager | Tour - 0 views

  • Submishmash Home Home Pricing Tour Blog Support Login How does it work? Submishmash empowers publishers and websites to accept any type of submission or easily run contests. In a few simple steps, you can immediately begin accepting manuscripts, artwork, applications, resumes, or multi-media like MP3s or videos. Be up and running in 5 minutes. Step 1: Sign Up Step 2: Customize your application (5 minutes) Step 3: Create a link in your website to your manager (i.e. http://ORGANIZATIONNAME.submishmash.com) Step 4: Immediately begin accepting submission, applications, or contest entries!
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    Submishmash Home Home Pricing Tour Blog Support Login How does it work? Submishmash empowers publishers and websites to accept any type of submission or easily run contests. In a few simple steps, you can immediately begin accepting manuscripts, artwork, applications, resumes, or multi-media like MP3s or videos. Be up and running in 5 minutes. Step 1: Sign Up Step 2: Customize your application (5 minutes) Step 3: Create a link in your website to your manager (i.e. http://ORGANIZATIONNAME.submishmash.com) Step 4: Immediately begin accepting submission, applications, or contest entries!
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    If you work with freelance contributions, this might be a helpful tool.
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