ProPublica’s newest news app uses education data to get more social

Niemanlabs reporting:
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights released a data set — the most comprehensive to date — documenting student access to advanced classes and special programs in public high schools. Shorthanded as the Civil Rights survey, the information tracks the availability of offerings, like Advanced Placement courses, gifted-and-talented programs, and higher-level math and science classes, that studies suggest are important factors for educational attainment — and for success later in life.
ProPublica reporters used the Ed data to produce a story package, “The Opportunity Gap,” that analyzes the OCR info and other federal education data; their analysis found among other things that, overall and unsurprisingly, high-poverty schools are less likely than their wealthier counterparts to have students enrolled in those beneficial programs. The achievement gap, the data suggest, isn’t just about students’ educational attainment; it’s also about the educational opportunities provided to those students in the first place. And it’s individual states that are making the policy decisions that affect the quality of those opportunities. ProPublica’s analysis, says senior editor Eric Umansky, is aimed at answering one key question: “Are states giving their kids a fair shake?”
The fact that the OCR data set is relatively comprehensive — reporting on districts with more than 3,000 students, it covers 85,000 schools, and around 75 percent of all public high schoolers in the U.S. — means that the OCR data set is also enormous. And while ProPublica’s text-based takes on the info have done precisely the thing you’d want them to do — find surprises, find trends, make it meaningful, make it human — the outfit’s reporters wanted to go beyond the database-to-narrative formula with the OCR trove. Their solution: a news app that encourages, even more than your typical app, public participation. And that looks to Facebook for social integration.

The app focuses on measuring equal access on a broad scale: It tracks not only the educational opportunities provided by each school, but also breakdowns of students’ race, disability status, gender, and English proficiency. It also highlights the percentage of teachers with two years’ experience or less — who, as a group, tend to effect smaller achievement gains than their more experienced counterparts — and the percentage of students who receive free or reduced-price school lunch, an indicator of poverty. (More on the developers’ methodology here.)
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/propublicas-newest-news-app-uses-education-data-to-get-more-social/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=b3ec0061fe-DAILY_EMAIL&utm_medium=email

From crowdfunding to data-driven journalism, four ways the Knight News Challenge is shaping the future

Poynter reporting:
As the Knight News Challenge prepares to announce its fifth group of winners today, we looked back at the previous four years, in which 63 projects received nearly $22 million.
The Knight Foundation has spread that money around, including academic research, software tools, urban hyperlocal reporting and basic information needs in developing countries.
In reviewing the winners, we identified four areas of now-rapid innovation in which News Challenge projects have pushed new approaches for journalism: Crowdfunding, the hacker-journalist, data as news and citizen journalism.

Of course, when you make dozens of bets on startups, some won’t pay off. Sometimes ideas aren’t as good as they sounded.
And sometimes good ideas — like conveying information through interactive games — are just harder to execute than anticipated. The News Challenge funded five gamification-of-news projects with almost $1 million. There was some success, but a lot of struggle, Newton said.
Even in the difficult cases, Knight and the participants learned valuable lessons, he said. And projects that did work as planned taught other lessons and blazed important trails to where journalism is headed.
One of journalism’s most urgent needs is finding new business models and funding methods.
Newspaper advertising revenue has been nearly halved since the News Challenge was announced in 2006. Online advertising has grown, but most news sites are still disappointed by ineffective display ads and low CPMs.
The News Challenge has not funded much in this space — only a few of the first 63 projects focused on ways to fund reporting. However, the projects it did fund may be among its most effective.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/136589/from-crowdfunding-to-data-driven-journalism-four-ways-the-knight-news-challenge-is-shaping-the-news

The Necessity of Data Journalism in the New Digital Community

Mediashift reporting:
 This is the second post in a series from Nicholas White, the co-founder and CEO of The Daily Dot.
It used to be, to be a good reporter, all you had to do was get drunk with the right people.
Sure, it helped if you could string a few words together, but what was really important was that when news broke, you could get the right person on the phone and get the skinny. Or when something scandalous was going down somewhere, someone would pick up the phone and call you.
Increasingly today, in selecting and training reporters, the industry seems to focus on the stringing-words-together part. (If CJR wants to study something, I suggest comparing alcohol consumption among newsroom employees and circulation. Both have been dropping steadily since the '70s. Coincidence? I think not.)
That's not how we're building our newsroom at The Daily Dot. Don't get me wrong, we want people who can write, but that's not actually our first -- or only -- criterion. While it's still early days, we've done at least two things that are very exciting and critical to our long-term success -- and they're not things that should remain unique to us. I think they point toward the future success of the industry as a whole.
One: Our very first newsroom hire, after our executive editor, was Grant Robertson, who's not only a reporter and an editor, but also a programmer. Two: We have, in partnership with the math whizzes at Ravel, analyzed the Reddit and Tumblr communities, ranking their users on a variety of metrics tracking activity, engagement and influence.
We found it necessary to push early in this direction because of our unique coverage area and we're in the fortunate position of being able to build our newsroom from scratch.
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/06/the-necessity-of-data-journalism-in-the-new-digital-community173.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pbs%2Fmediashift-blog+%28mediashift-blog%29

Inbox Influence reveals your connections’ connections

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:

By Andrew Phelps

The Internet was supposed to usher in a new era of transparency. Groups like the Sunlight Foundation, the Center for Responsive Politics, OpenCongress, and even the government’s own Data.gov provide oceans of data for the curious, concerned citizen.
If the truth is in the data, however, you still have to go find it. That’s why open-government websites are mostly popular with journalists and activists, the people willing to pull up their sleeves and wade through the numbers.
A new tool from the Sunlight Foundation would seem to seek to tweak that paradigm. It’s called Inbox Influence, a Gmail plugin that requires exactly one step: installing it. When an email message arrives — from a company, a political candidate, a PR person, your aunt — you’ll see statistics about that entity’s political connections. The plugin detects names in body text, email addresses, and links.
For example, I received a news alert from The New York Times about Comcast’s successful bid to broadcast the Olympics until 2020. The company’s name is highlighted; when I mouse over, a popup graphic tells me:
Comcast Corp. has given $16.9 million to politicians
A majority of the cash has gone to Democrats
The company has spent $66.7 million on lobbying
see video.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/inbox-influence-reveals-your-connections-connections/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=cab37b8956-DAILY_EMAIL&utm_medium=email

Media companies haven’t exploited opportunities created by iPad and mobile technology

Poynter  Damon Kieslow: So far those (iPad) opportunities have gone largely unexploited as media companies try to figure out exactly what tablets are good for. As I noted last month, most of the U.S. newspaper apps to launch recently on the iPad are replica editions — basically PDFs of the printed product. While there may be a small audience for these replicas, this is a transitional model at best and will do nothing to build new audiences on tablets.
Likewise, many interactive newspaper apps are a lot like print products — but not necessarily in a good way. Apps from USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are well designed, but they still offer the same type of content as in print, with a similar look and feel.
Personalized news services like News.me and Trove are entirely new forms of news presentation, pushing the medium forward with a mix of aggregation, social media, curation and filtering. For better or worse, the vanguard of this effort consists of startups like Flipboard, Zite, News 360 and Taptu, not longstanding media companies.
So, just over a year into the age of the iPad, what can media do to compete? Clay Shirky has suggested that “nothing will work, but everything might.” That is a call to experiment,  fail and try again. Not every startup will succeed, but it only takes one Craigslist or Google to devastate an old industry (classifieds) or start a new one (search advertising).
The problem has been that media companies are not trying enough, quickly enough. It is not that media cannot innovate, it is that media organizations have not been structured to encourage it.
That is beginning to change, slowly. Look again at News.me and Trove. Neither is a finished product or a perfect one. But both were created by newspaper companies that put resources into research and development. News.me was created by The New York Times R&D lab and transitioned to Betaworks for development. Trove was built by the WaPo Labs team.
Tackable, a crowdsourced photojournalism app, is another example. An independent developer is building the app, but the San Jose Mercury News is incubating it. Tackable gets office space and some development assistance, and the Mercury News gets a version of the app built to its specifications.
And this week, the first round of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Challenge launched. In the next two years the project will fund fellowships for 15 developers in newsrooms in the U.S. and abroad to “harness open-Web innovation for journalism.” One of the first challenges is building HTML5 apps for Web and mobile platforms.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-media/129372/media-companies-havent-exploited-opportunities-created-by-ipad-and-mobile-technology