We've been using a variety of web-based bookmarking tools for the past four or five years, tools like the now-departed Blink and Backflip.  They were all OK (so long as they remained financially viable), but never quite seemed to meet all our needs.  Recently, though, we learned about Furl (www.furl.net) and we like what we see.  Furl is in beta, so we don't know what the ultimate price will be, but journalists will like the ease with which we can pull URLs off a web page, markup those savings with keywords, copy-and-paste webpage annotations and then save the citation in a folder of your making.  Oh yeah, you can also save and e-mail the link(s) to anyone.  In fact, we like Furl so much, we will be demo-ing it next week at the IRE conference in Denver.

It can. 

The NYT this morning tells us that “Big News Media Join in Push to Limit Use of Unidentified Sources.”  Readers are told:

“Concerned that they may have become too free in granting anonymity to sources, news organizations including USA Today, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News and The New York Times are trying to throttle back their use.
     “But
some journalists worry that these efforts could hamper them from doing
their jobs – coming in a hothouse atmosphere where mistrust of the news
media is rampant, hordes of newly minted media critics attack every
misstep on the Web, and legal cases jeopardize their ability to keep
unnamed news sources confidential….
     “Last year, The New York Times adopted a more stringent approach to its
treatment of confidential sources, including a provision that the
identity of every unidentified source must be known to at least one
editor. A committee of the paper's journalists recently recommended
that the top editors put in place new editing mechanisms to ensure that
current policies are enforced more fully and energetically.”

We look forward to these “new editing mechanisms.”

Yes, policies on unnamed sources should be made,
those policies should be clear and everyone in the newsroom should know
what they are.  But more often (as in “every day”), editors must
know the sources — indeed, all sources
— are for a story, how to reach those souces and how to verify what
the reporter wrote, even if the reporter is out-of-pocket. 

This is not difficult if journalists recognize that a
PC-based word processing application already has the tools to assist in
this “Who Are The Sources” mission. (If the publication is still using
something like the old Coyote terminals, sorry, we probably can't
help  you.) 

The tool is the “comment” function in the word processor.  While the newsroom is making policies about sourcing, add this one: “Every
paragraph of every story will end with an embedded comment.  That
comment will show editors exactly how the reporter knows what he or she
just wrote.”  The comment might include a source's name,
phone number and date-time-place of interview.  The comment might
include a URL or a bibliographic citation.  It might include
reference to the specific reporter's notebook.  But in the end,
the comments should be sufficient that an editor can “walk the cat
backward” to determine exactly how the reporter knows what he/she just
wrote.  Doing so helps prevent unwarranted assumptions and errors
of fact, if not interpretation.

There will be those of the Burn-Your-Notes School of
libel defense who will contend this is comment thing is suicidal. 
We would suggest, first, that very few stories ever become court
cases.  Secondly remember that truth is the first defense in libel
actions, and it is our responsibility to deliver that truth.

Here
at the IAJ we believe one of the reasons people come to newspapers or
broadcast stations is to get the data which, upon analysis, they can
turn into information that helps them make decisions.  Ergo, the
more meaningful data a journalistic institution can provide, the
greater value that institution has for a community.



A good example arrived today thanks to Tara Calishain, creator of ResearchBuzz.  She writes:

** Getcher Cheap Gas Prices on Google Maps

<http://www.researchbuzz.org/getcher_cheap_gas_prices_on_google_maps.shtml>



“Remember
when I was saying that I would love a Gasbuddy / Google Maps mashups
that showed cheap gas prices along a trip route?   Turns out
somebody has already done it —  well, sorta. You can specify a
state, city  (only selected cities are available) and 
whether you're looking for regular or diesel  fuel. Check it out
at  http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ “

Would readers appreciate this sort of data?  We think so,
especially if there was an online sign-up and the news provider would
deliver the changing price info via e-mail or IM much like Travelocity
tells us when airline ticket prices change by TK dollars.

Jump into the study of epidemiology with Prof. David Kleinbaum and Prof. Nancy Barker in the online course “Fundamentals of Epidemiology” at statistics.com June 10 – July 15.  Using their electronic textbook “ActiveEpi”, this introductory course emphasizes the underlying  concepts andmethods of epidemiology. Topics covered  include: study designs (clinical trials, cohort studies,  case-control studies, and cross-sectional studies),  measures of disease frequency and effect.



Dr. Kleinbaum, professor at Emory University, is internationally known for his textbooks in statistical and epidemiologic methods and also as an outstanding teacher.  He is the author of “Epidemiologic Research-Principles and Quantitative Methods”, “Logistic Regression- A Self-Learning Text”, and “Survival  Analysis- A Self Learning Text”.  Prof. Barker is a consulting biostatistician and a co-author of the “ActivEpi Companion Text”, and has over 10 years of experience teaching short courses in epidemiology and  biostatistics at Emory and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.



The course takes place online at statistics.com in a  series of 5 weekly lessons and assignments. Course participants work directly with both instructors via a  private discussion board.  Participate in the course at  your own convenience; there are no set times when you are required to be online.



For registration and information:

http://www.statistics.com/content/courses/epi1/index.html



Peter Bruce

courses@statistics.com



P.S.  Coming up June 3 at statistics.com:  “Toxicological

Risk Assessment” and “Using the Census's new 'American

Community Survey' ” and, on June 10, “Categorical Data

Analysis.”

The
current issue of WIRED (or is it only the online WIRED News?  I'm
not always sure which is which.) carrieds a piece on what Amazon is
doing with its search engines to tease data out of the PDF books it
carries.  “Judging a Book by its Contents”
includes the following from Amazon exec. Bill Carr.  Oh that news
organizations could bring the same type of thinking to their archives.

Bill Carr, Amazon's executive vice president of digital media, confirms that this is a serious attempt to sell more books.

“We've been spending a lot of time thinking, 'We have this rich digital
content, how can we pull info out and expose it to customers that makes
discovery even better?'” Carr said. “What you are seeing here are the
fruits of a lot experimenting and brainstorming.”

Carr points to the “adaptive unconscious” SIP from Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, Blink, as an example of how improbable data mining can get a curious reader into the long tail of Amazon's catalog.”

Benjamin Vershbow, a researcher at the Institute for the Future of the Book,”…sees Amazon's data mining as part of a trend on the web where sites are
learning to weave data sources together to create a new web experience.”

Someone, and it won't be a newspaper or magazine
publisher, will see an opportunity to do the same thing with our
archives.  No, Lexis-Nexis is just a warehouse.  Valuable,
but not much added value.

Our friend Barbara Semonche, news researcher extraordinaire, makes the following post to the NewLib listserv:

“If our NewsLib subscribers
are interested in the fulltext of the Coleman and Wilkins research on
journalists' ethics (published in the Autumn 2004 issue of Journalism
& Mass Communication Quarterly) here is the direct

URL: http://www.aejmc.org/pubs/jmcqaut04/coleman.pdf



     “Makes for
rather provocative reading in some respects. An example: this research
mentions two variables — investigative reporting and civic journalism
— as having been linked to moral development in journalists in
qualitative work. The  researchers in their literature review
mention studies that have
shown investigative  reporters to make moral decisions regarding
wrongdoing then abandon objectivity to push for public good, serve as
moral judges, and deal with ethical issues more than other types of
reporters. Hmmmmmm.”

One of the underlying — and motivating — assumptions here at the IAJ is that having good data is a prerequisite to
doing good analysis.  And the analytic journalist needs to know
first what data is available before any questions can be raised about
the quality and defintion of that data.  All this means we are
talking about transparency in government and, when possible, the
private sector.  (It also applies to transparency in
journalism.  More on that here and in days to come.)

On that site you will find:
“This Special Report on Public Sector Transparency illustrates current international trends in
advancing transparency through civil society, government and the media. Through extensive interviews
with leaders across a range of sectors as well as survey feedback from Development Gateway users, this Report
explores the practical issues of ensuring openness in governments around the world.”

In
the IAJ's on-going search for new methodologies, reinforcing lessons
often come through.  On Saturday, April 30, NPR's Scott Simon
taked with John Lentini about analyzing fires.  Lentini's comments
emphasize the need for questioning assumptions and pressing hard to
clarify definitions.



From NPR's “Weekend Edition Saturday:”

“John Lentini, an arson expert, tells Scott Simon about changes that have
brought into question many convictions based on outdated methods of
determining arson. One of this convictions resulted in the execution of
a Texas man in 2004.”  To listen, click here.

Derek
Willis — who might be considered an analytic journalist's analytic
journalist — reminded us today that there already is an abundance of
resources in every newsroom in the world.  The problem is,
journalists don't understand the concept of synergy, and that one piece
of your information and one piece of my information can total the three pieces required to produce an uncommonly good story.

See:
Derek Willis' The Scoop
http://www.thescoop.org/thefix/

Spatial data analysis and Geographic Information System (GIS)
technology contribute to the advancement of crime analysis and the
better understanding of criminal behavior. Since 1997 the Mapping &
Analysis for Public Safety (MAPS) program, formerly the Crime Mapping
Research Center (CMRC), has reached out to academics and practitioners
alike in the criminology, criminal justice and law enforcement
communities to bridge the gap between research and practice. The MAPS
program awards grants, sponsors conferences and workshops, publishes
reports, and provides guidance. It also disseminates information on
training opportunities in spatial data analysis techniques and GIS
technology. In all, the program focuses on research, evaluation,
development, coordination, and dissemination.