Data, journalism and other stuff...

A good idea from across the pond — requesting the data to see how many unemployed people are applying for jobs.

The key paragraph:

Research by the Guardian suggests even these figures mask the true competition for work. The national Jobcentre Plus database is available online for jobseekers to search for vacancies, but the full cache of jobs on offer cannot be downloaded for analysis. The Guardian obtained the full data using the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and for the first time analysed more than 112,000 vacancies for information on the number of hours on offer, whether vacancies were self-employed, offered any guaranteed hours and whether they were permanent or temporary.

On judging working that matters and how to quantify it…

cirlabs:

Before you read this, I encourage you to visit the thoughtful post by the Washington Post’s Greg Linch on the same subject. It gets to the heart of an issue that, at least in my opinion, is going to be extremely important to the success of public service journalism – and particularly the…

(Source: cirlabs)

“Rather than try to imply a structure on newsrooms for how they have to upload their data, which is really fraught, we are taking the approach that if we put all of this information in the same place and allow you to search your data in the way that you would search Google there is a lot of value,” (Groskopf) said.

Once there is a central depository for newsrooms to keep their data individual reporters, regardless of their SQL knowledge, will be able to query for results and receive updates on their beat.

“Business reporters might want to have alerts on certain businesses they cover,” he said. “So they won’t have to keep searching the same data set uploaded by someone else there could be some sort of notifications for that reporter… like e-mail alerts. I don’t think we know what shape something like that will take at this point, but that feature will be in the final product.”

—Share, interact with data easier with a PANDA in your newsroom, an interview I did with Chris Groskopf for IRE’s On the Road Blog.

There are going to be some agencies that won’t want to fill your requests. Just hound them for it. Make sure you call them out in the end.

—Matthew Doig, Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigations editor, in Behind the Story: Tracking problem police officers in Florida on IRE’s On The Road blog. Doig took time last month to talk with me about the paper’s series looking at Florida cops’ complaint records.

This,” he said, “is War and Peace as told by a visual Tolstoy.” The map is about the size of a car window, and follows the French invasion of Russia in 1812. It was drawn in 1869 by a French engineer named Charles Joseph Minard. On the left of the map, on the banks of the Niemen River, near Kovno in modern-day Lithuania, a horizontal tan stripe represents the initial invasion force of 420,000 French soldiers. As they march east, toward Moscow—to the right, on the map—they begin to die, and the stripe narrows.

—The Information Sage

Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.