Data-Driven Journalism: The Basics - week 2 (DDJ) pt. 1

Week 2 is brought to us by Lise Olsen of the Houston Chronicle.

She has the brilliant idea to have a page where she puts the links for all the things that she discusses in her videos (lectures) .  Brilliant.  Although this quadruples the amount of reading material that you have, if you are going to be hard core about this learning gig.  I like to pretend that I am ...

http://www.newslab.org/2012/11/20/tips-for-investigative-reporting/
Lee Zurik, WVUE New Orleans

• IRE - Investigative Reporters and Editors http://www.ire.org/

• Regularly request records, public documents

• Your request might lead to an anonymous or not so anonymous tip regarding what to look for
  
• Ask for records electronically

• Keep track of the law, court cases and opinions from attorney general, in case someone gives you grief about your info request

• Look at hidden entities, Brett Shipp investigate obscure entities and agencies

• Strong investigations dig deeper than one or two stories, be prepared to follow your story as long as it takes

Video 1

• Freedom of information acts in over 100 countries
• Don't have to be a citizen to make a request
• Reporters committee for Freedom of the press has info on US laws http://www.rcfp.org
• Global Investigative Journalism Network has links to laws worldwide. http://gijn.org/resources/freedom-of-information-laws/
• Know your rights, use sources to figure out what records you are entitled to, who to ask, insist that you get them
• Public officials may ignore them but the also might not.
• You might have other ways to get the data
  
• Govt's post data
• Search Systems http://publicrecords.searchsystems.net - what records are posted for free, property records, corporate records, licensing records for Dr's, lawyers, massage therapists, bar owners, find connections between people and doing stories
• Advanced Google search look inside the website for documents uploaded, search by format .xls, .ppt
• Declarations of asset
•  Property and business records
• Corporate registries
• Payroll/salary databases/travel and expense records
• Press releases and candidate statements/ in office and over time
• Public Contract databases
• social media
• Look for videos and photos
• twitter, FB, linked in and youtube
• old webpages on the wayback machine http://archive/org/web/web/pjp

Don't do data without the journalism
What's surprising, weird or even illegal
What's the context or the news
What's changed
Look for lies and contraditions
Don't forget human sources, ask them to send you data

• money laundrering
• corporations tied to him and family members
• property records
• Google earth of property
• records - public official's wife's facebook page
• take info and put it in a format that can be analyzed
• 
  

Search for data, check out the links to data sites
Review a story or video from the reading list
Join discussions
Review the more Ideas presentation

Note to Self - Mozilla is awesome and There are lots of places on the web to learn

I often forget how awesome Mozilla is.  Then I install it on another computer and am reminded of their awesome mission and worldview and of the fact that they build all kinds of other software besides that browser and work on any number of projects all the damn time.  Some of the projects are listed at Mozilla Labs.

One of future interest is the School of Webcraft (https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/school-of-webcraft/).

There are other places to learn webby, codey things, like the Code Academy.

I attended a Drumbeat meetup years and years ago.  I couldn't really contribute.  I didn't have a problem to be solved with technology and I can't code.  (a little bit of html but really, that's all I remember at this point).  But it was exciting to be there.  To be where it was all going down and talk to people about what they were doing.

One of the projects mentioned was: P2PU - "A University for the Web. Built by an Open Community."  The School of Webcraft is, in fact one of their projects.

In the realm of things that are not free but might be interesting - Skillshare

Not an Autodidact

Up to now I have been lucky to learn from a series of really wonderful teachers.  I have been really lucky and very spoiled.

I have always admired the autodidact.  Up to now, I have had limited success in the area of self-education.  But I have my whole life to pursue it.  It's this or more shopping, drinking and distraction.  (There is all too much of all of these things...)

I'd like to use this blog as a notebook for aspects of the process.  Notes will be jotted down.  Jumbled up and perhaps not making a lot or sense.  Plenty of incomplete thoughts.  Hopefully the linkrot will not get too bad.  This will not be a focused place.

To begin I am taking too many online classes with Coursera.org and the Knight Center.

Virology, Biostatistics, Data Driven Journalism

As a ne'er do well and a procrastinator, I am very far behind in all of these.  Defeat might need to be conceded in these cases.  But I promise to try, try again.

And there will be other things non-course related, I am sure ...