NPR announced to staff Monday that it is creating a team to build news applications and has hired the Chicago Tribune’s Brian Boyer to lead it.
The announcement represents a big bet on news applications, not just because of the … Read more
To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can't see it.His post is worth a read not just to see his reasoning, but because you can see how he turns tweets like this one from venture capitalist Fred Wilson:
"A young man asked me for advice 'for those who aren't technical.' I said he should try to get technical."Into:
"A young man asked me for advice 'for those who aren't plumbers.' I said he should try to become a plumber."No one has written a single line of code since Atwood posted this; everyone has been too busy tweeting, blogging, and snarking in response. (more...)
Derek Willis’ first 1A byline at The New York Times was for a story reporting that big donors aren’t contributing to President Barack Obama at the pace they did in the 2008 election cycle.
That story was done in the … Read more
This election season, Google has demonstrated how a political party can use free and freely available tools like Google Docs to distribute election results without the news media.
Tuesday, the Associated Press demonstrated that it had gotten the message – … Read more
The Associated Press and Google are rewriting the book this year on how to provide fast, accurate election results, and the theme of the latest chapter is cooperation.
Tuesday night, news outlets that pay AP for election results for particular … Read more
Dan Sinker: Journo-coders took NICAR conference to another level
“It’s not even March yet and the amount of awesome coming out of the journalism code community is already overwhelming.”
The findings suggest that while polls and horse race set a context for the way media portray the race, the narrative itself is dominated by the daily back and forth of the campaign dialogue. Thus while it may seem counterintuitive that Romney has a bad week after cementing his frontrunner status in New Hampshire, the coverage also reflects the intensifying attempts to blunt that momentum. And last week that centered on a debate over his career in private equity.Related: Dan Zarrella compares the campaigns on Twitter, from followers and retweets to how much people are talking about them | Pew: Twitter chatter about GOP candidates less factual, more negativeWhy journalists struggle to cover Romney's record at Bain Capital (Poynter)
Here's the issue: Counting the number of times a candidate's name is mentioned on social media and noting what words appear alongside those mentions can illuminate broad trends. You can report that "more people talked about Candidate X today" and "Y percent of that group used word ZZZZ in their comment." But you can't make any kind of meaningful judgment about what those people intended by that usage without asking them.(more...)
WNYC’s John Keefe decided to use Google’s election results for his map tracking the results of Iowa’s GOP caucus for three reasons: