Poynter Online - Al's Morning Meeting

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2007

Monday Edition: An Online Interactive Thanksgiving

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The other day somebody was asking me how I would make Thanksgiving coverage more interactive on a news site. I came up with these notions:

Include a travel mapmaker widget on your site for people to quickly map their holiday trips without having to go to Yahoo! Maps.

Invite first-time Thanksgiving cooks to send video/photos of their masterpieces. Invite folks to send photos of food disasters, too. Readers would vote for the best turkey picture and the worst disaster.

For people who have no place to go for Thanksgiving, have them send a photo of what they ate -- sort of a takeoff on the "airlinemeals" site that encourages people to post pictures of their miserable airline food. The most pitiful photo gets a voucher to a nice restaurant.

A virtual blessing. Get some clergy of various faiths to record blessings for meals. Then the users can select which blessing they want to play before their meals in whatever language or faith they choose (Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian and so on). You could also record them on a phone line -- "Press 1 for a Hindu blessing, press 2 for a Jewish blessing," and so on. I imagine people putting their cellphones on speaker and listening to the blessing from a well-known religious leader.

Post a blessing. Record the blessing that was offered at your Thanksgiving meal and share it.

Show us what you are thankful for in a video or in photos. No need for long text -- show us.

Set up a turkey hotline using food specialists, celebrity chefs, nutritionists.

Ask a shrink. Do an online chat with a family counselor on how to minimize friction when the family gets together. What advice would that expert give to the single person who gets nailed every year with, "When are you going to get married?" Let people tell their stories of family gatherings gone ugly.

Overeaters Anonymous groups are really active around the holidays. Find a group that meets on Thanksgiving Day. You might include a blog of folks who struggle with this for the entire holiday season. I bet it would be encouraging for people to know they are not alone in that struggle.

How much does it take to walk off a Thanksgiving meal? Read it and pass the pie, please.

Using GPS to Track the Cops

My friend Ted Oberg, a reporter at KTRK-TV in Houston, turned an interesting story. The station used data from GPS devices installed in city police cars to find out where the cops are every hour of the day. What emerged was a picture of just how few officers there are on the street at any given time. Ted's story shows the greatest number of officers are available at 3 p.m., but a third of the cops are at police substations, not on the street.

And the police are least available at the very time that violent crime is most likely, late at night.

See the story here, and see maps of four days of patrol here.

I asked Ted some questions about his project:

Ted Oberg

How did you get the data you used?

A. I heard the police department bought the GPS system this summer. I called the tech guys at the dispatch center to find out how it worked and then filed an open records request. It took a lot of data work to get at the usable info. We got help from The National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR) and Steve Bivens, an investigative producer, who's great at data stuff. Once I was done I showed it to the Houston Police Department. They hadn't done what we did with it. They were reluctant to sign off on it, but did say the totals matched their information.

Q. What surprised you most about what you found?

A. I knew Houston had a police shortage. The mayor, chief and police union are honest and open about that. When I was a crime victim (minor stuff) it took forever to get police response so I knew how frustrating it was.

What surprised me most was that at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, when bars are closing and violent crime is near its daily peak, we had just 186 patrol officers on duty. We are a 600 square-mile city, with 2 million-plus citizens and less than 200 cops on patrol -- that was surprising. No public official ever told us it was that low. The department says plenty more units are undercover, but they don't respond to 911 calls.

Q. What did you learn about when the largest/smallest patrols were on duty?

A. I got conflicting info about that. The largest times, 2 p.m and 3 p.m., are traditional shift change times. But the executive assistant chief in charge of patrol told me shifts are now staggered around the clock. So it's hard to tell why the numbers are so big then. When we looked at our maps closer to find out where the officers were when there were lots of officers on duty, it turned out 35-plus percent of them were at police stations.

That was surprising. It leads me to believe they are doing start/end of shift stuff. We didn't allege any wrongdoing by officers; the simple reality is that with such a manpower shortage, it's tough to cover the city when so many are at the substations.

Q. Were you able to find some cop cars that seemed to be parked and never moved?

A. We probably could have, but didn't have time to look. We decided early on to make this a story about how short on manpower the city is. We didn't look at officers wasting time. It was a system story, not a waste story. It probably could've been stronger with some surveillance.

Q. Are these kinds of GPS trackers rare among police departments?

A. I don't think so. They're called AVL (Automatic Vehicle Locator) systems. Houston's was purchased with a homeland security grant. Our fire department's used it for years. It's sold by Northrop Grumman. This article says similar systems are used in Arizona, Chicago and New York.

Q. What advice would you give to other journalists considering a story like this one?

A. Give yourself the time to understand the system. As with many data stories, the people who keep the data will (rightly) be proud of their system. They will most likely be happy to talk about capabilities, how the system is designed, how the data is exportable and what can be done with it.

Enlist help to do the data work. Ours came as massive text files. It can seem impossible to dig through, but decide what bite you want to take. We decided to do hourly snapshots. The system will allow you to track cars throughout the city during their shift. The data work involved in that was too daunting for us. You just have to be honest with viewers about the fact that you are taking hourly snapshots, not round-the-clock readings. We did that online and in my live tags.

I would be prepared for the criticism that you are giving crooks the keys to the city. We purposefully used data that was a few weeks old and addressed it in the lead to the story.

The police department didn't raise a big fuss over the security nor did they fight our records request.

New European News Tracker

When I teach Web research classes, somebody always asks what they should use to track international news. Now there is a new tool that I like: Imooty.

The site not only tracks mainstream news outlets but blogs, too.

News on the site is published in each country's language and may be translated by using the Babelfish translation tool. I am very impressed by that feature. Just click on the country of Spain, for example, then click on the word "English" at the top of the page and the whole collection gets translated. I would love to hear from you on how accurate you think the translations are.