Idea Lab

How Would You Start a Newsroom's Website From Scratch?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Starting from scratch, where would you start? Last Friday was my last day as program director of DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. I've got a few more talks lined up (I'll be showing off DocumentCloud at SEJ in Miami and talking about our work at MobilityShifts), and I'll still be part of DocumentCloud's advisory group, but it was time to hand the reins over to the (very capable) staff at IRE. For my next trick, I'm helping get a new accountability journalism project off the ground....

• October 10, 2011
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DocumentCloud: Why Talking to People Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I hopped down to New Orleans this week, to tell even more journalists about DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, and had the opportunity to sit down with The Lens' Ariella Cohen and Steve Beatty. Steve is doing some great work on a charter school reporting project, covering every New Orleans parish school board and incorporating documents about many of them. Most of what we discussed is what I talk to most journalists about: how they approach their work, what they see as their mission, and the...

• September 30, 2011
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DocumentCloud Welcomes a New Lead Developer

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As DocumentCloud settles into our comfy, new home in Missouri, we're quite pleased to welcome Ted Han aboard as our new lead developer. Though our prior lead developer, Jeremy Ashkenas, has moved to a full-time position at The New York Times, he continues to be an active and enthusiastic contributor to DocumentCloud's open-source tools and platform. DocumentCloud is a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. Ted joins DocumentCloud from Videojuicer, an online video platform focused on open standards and software integration. He's a computational linguist by degree, developer by...

• August 10, 2011
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DocumentCloud Weathers Obama Birth Certificate, Palin Emails, Merger with IRE

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When President Obama released his birth certificate and dozens of news organizations turned to DocumentCloud to present it to their readers, I snarked a bit. Though the birth certificate did prompt a few questions -- which we're still navigating -- about the best way to handle duplicate uploads, the secret truth was we were both proud and flattered that so many newsrooms, faced with a document they wanted their readers to see, came straight to us and knew they could count on us. When half a dozen newsrooms turned to us to help them get Sarah Palin's emails out to...

• July 26, 2011
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DocumentCloud Merges With IRE

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

DocumentCloud is beyond delighted to announce we've found a long-term home for our project. We're merging our operation with Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit grassroots organization committed to fostering excellence in investigative journalism. This transition means that DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, will have a permanent place in a longstanding resource for investigative reporting. IRE has a long and established history of supporting investigative reporting, and we'll be a proud part of their ongoing work to provide journalists with tools that support their reporting. It...

• June 9, 2011
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Reporters Bring Sources Right Into the Story With DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Embedding notes makes it even easier for reporters to bring source documents right into the story. One of DocumentCloud's primary goals is to make it simpler for news organizations to show their work -- to invite readers to review the very same documents the journalists used to draw the conclusions in their reporting. The latest addition to our toolbox, which we quietly rolled out last month, allows reporters to embed a single annotation in a story online, and we've been delighted to see newsrooms making excellent use of it. City officials in Torrance, Calif., circulated a press release explaining their...

• June 7, 2011
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Much Ado About Obama's Birth Certificate on DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we watched traffic stats skyrocket last month as newsroom after newsroom uploaded President Obama's birth certificate to DocumentCloud and then embedded it, my reaction was hardly one of joy. Why on Earth is a birth certificate more interesting than, say, the pages and pages of receipts documenting some outrageous meals (15 steaks, two orders of fish and a lamb chop -- for five people submitted by National Grid to the Long Island Power Authority after their Hurricane Earl cleanup)? I like to think these are the documents we built DocumentCloud for -- that we're here to give a leg...

• May 11, 2011
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How DocumentCloud Helped Award-Winning Investigations

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) announced their medal winners this week, and we were impressed to see that both winners wove DocumentCloud into their winning reporting. Since 1979, IRE has honored outstanding investigative work with their annual awards. This year they honored a Los Angeles Times series on outrageous salaries in one of California's poorest towns and a collaboration between International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC for a report on the global asbestos trade. Breach of Faith Los Angeles Times was awarded an IRE Medal for Breach of Faith. An investigation of financial impropriety in a small town...

• April 14, 2011
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DocumentCloud Enables Public Searches, Embeddable Sets

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We quietly opened DocumentCloud's catalog to public searches in January, and we've been working since to do more with the great documents that reporters have added to our catalog. When Vancouver Sun investigative reporter Chad Skelton asked if there was a way to automate display of the growing cache of documents he was retrieving from the city's ferry authority, the best answer we could offer was to point his readers to a search for the DocumentCloud project he was stashing them in. Our goal from the outset has been to help news organizations make their own substantive reporting more engaging...

• March 31, 2011
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DocumentCloud Passes Major Milestone: 1 Million Pages Uploaded

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

DocumentCloud's Jeremy Ashkenas collaborated on this post. It has been less than a year since DocumentCloud began adding users to our beta. Late Monday morning, a user uploaded our millionth page of primary source documents. The thousands of documents in our catalog have arrived in small batches: five pages here, twenty there. The vast majority of the 65,000 documents that those million pages comprise remain private, but we're fast closing in on 10,000 public documents in our catalog. Broad Appeal Journalists are using DocumentCloud to publish all sorts of documents, including these: Last week, the Center for Public Integrity launched...

• March 1, 2011
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3 Ways to Expand the News Ecosystem

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spot.Us founder David Cohn has convened a virtual carnival: He's posing monthly questions that he'd like to see journalists take a stab at answering. The latest: how do we diversify the news ecosystem? He put it differently -- "Considering your unique circumstances, what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?" -- but I'm pretty sure the end goal is a greater diversity of information and expanded news ecosystem. What can I do? Work to make document-based investigative reporting a little easier and a little more transparent. That's what DocumentCloud is all about. One thing we can...

• February 23, 2011
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Which Metrics Matter for Measuring User Engagement?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gail Robinson's recent post on traffic in a post-loyal era got me thinking about measures of web traffic and, more broadly, how to measure the impact of non-profit journalism. I certainly don't disagree with Gotham Gazette's decision to pass on providing Yahoo with free content. There's no good reason that Yahoo can't create a lively community without wholly reprinting Gotham Gazette's excellent original reporting free of charge. There are probably good reasons that it would complicate Gotham Gazette's work to license stories to a commercial outlet like Yahoo Local, too: As a non-profit, the local policy publication regularly livens up...

• January 18, 2011
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Altering Docs? Now There's a Tool for That in DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we embarked on the DocumentCloud project, tools for altering documents were the furthest thing from our minds. After all, a responsible journalist doesn't tweak source documents! But one of the first papers to embed material using DocumentCloud needed to do just that. The Chicago Tribune accompanied their coverage of a troubled foster home with a collection of letters and court orders. Though the documents offered an excellent illustration of the state child services agency's lax oversight and slipped follow-ups, they were predictably full of personal information about children in the foster care system, individual agency staff names and other...

• December 9, 2010
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Last Minute News Challenge Tips: Tell a Story, Be Realistic, and More

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Planning to spend the long weekend finalizing your Knight News Challenge application? It's too late for my favorite bit of advice ("don't wait until the last minute!"), but as someone who's been involved with three different winning projects, I like to fancy that I've got got some insight into what makes a good project. A half dozen prospective applicants have sat down with me to workshop their News Challenge ideas, and I think I've helped them think through their projects to get them to a more viable place. The application process isn't hard, but you do need to give some...

• November 24, 2010
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DocumentCloud Users Make Ballot Design An Election Issue

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we make lists of the kinds of source documents users can upload to DocumentCloud, they can get pretty long. DocumentCloud is court filings, hearing transcripts, testimony, legislation, lab reports, memos, meeting minutes, correspondence. I can say with absolute confidence that in all of our planning, "ballots" never once came up as the sort of document a news organization might want to annotate for readers. Our relentlessly creative users have shown us otherwise. This summer, the Memphis Commercial Appeal rounded out its guide to August's primary elections with a sample ballot. Their digital content editor told us that many readers...

• October 27, 2010
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The Best User Feedback Comes From Watching and Listening

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

ProPublica used DocumentCloud to develop an excellent story they published Friday. I'd planned to write it up, but Krista Kjellman Schmidt, the news applications editor who worked on the story, put it much better than I ever could have. Here's the opening of her post: On Oct. 8, we published an investigation examining how a judicial opinion in a pivotal lawsuit brought by a Guantanamo detainee vanished, only to be replaced weeks later by an entirely different opinion. At the center of our reporting are two documents representing separate versions of that same opinion: the original opinion written by Judge...

• October 12, 2010
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DocumentCloud Helps Newspapers Bring Transparency to Government

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we last updated readers on DocumentCloud's progress, we've made it much easier to upload a lot of documents at once, and introduced a related documents search that uses data about names and places provided by OpenCalais to find documents that are probably related to the one you're looking at. We've also added a bit more contextto the data we help reporters comb through. Most of this work is happening inside the gates of the DocumentCloud workspace, but it is resulting in some lively reporting. For example... Using Documents to Tell the Story This summer, as the federal 5th Circuit...

• September 7, 2010
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DocumentCloud Helps Arizona Paper with Annotated Immigration Law

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We opened the DocumentCloud floodgates less than six months ago and we're still working hard to make DocumentCloud a better tool. We're rolling out improvements at a healthy clip including SSL support, better documentation, and support for cross-newsroom collaboration. We continue to listen to feedback from our really incredible crop of beta testers (who now number close to 500!). There are nearly 100 newsrooms participating in the DocumentCloud beta and requests are still pouring in. We've been doing a fair amount of outreach and more is in the works, but it turns out that our users are our best advocates:...

• August 3, 2010
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Gathering Examples of Collaboration in Investigative Reporting

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2010 conference and ended up talking with Astrid Gynnild, a post doctoral research associate in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway. She's researching collaborations in investigative journalism. I showed her some of my favorites: The Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, ABC News and Washington Post working together on Disposable Army was one of them. Frontline, ProPublica and the Times-Picayune's coverage of police shootings that were never investigated after Hurricane Katrina is also great reporting, but she's looking for more. Are you collaborating internationally? On...

• June 23, 2010
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In Need of a DocumentCloud for Video, Data

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brainstorming the next brilliant News Challenge project? I've got two for you, and you've got until fall to noodle over them. As the program director for DocumentCloud I spend a lot of time talking to journalists, writers and researchers about what DocumentCloud is and, often, what it isn't. DocumentCloud is great for documents. It is a repository of primary source texts and a great set of semantic analysis tools for text. Whether you want to use our annotation tools for reporting jujitsu, as ProPublica did when the subject of an extensive report offered only "no comment" on nearly every question...

• April 30, 2010
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Documents Pouring in as DocumentCloud Goes Beta

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eagle-eyed followers of the DocumentCloud Twitter feed have already picked up on the fact that we began adding users to our beta last month. We made a strategic decision to peg our beta to NICAR's March 2010 computer assisted reporting conference, where we knew we'd be able to gather a sizable group of just the sort of investigative reporters we hope to support with DocumentCloud, and get them excited about using our tools to do more with their documents. Nothing beats hands-on support when you're using a new tool. Plus, we identified dozens of quick fixes we could make after...

• April 11, 2010
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So You Want to Try Crowdsourcing?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is no secret that I'm always on the hunt for great crowdsourcing projects. We're still learning a lot about what "the crowd" can tackle and what it can't, but turning to your readers (listeners, community, neighbors) is a great way to foster civic participation because it gives people a stake in the news. What I really want to know, though, is what makes crowdsourcing sing? Sunlight's Transparency Corps project to slice Kentucky legislative voting records has been sitting less than half complete for months now, while the Brooklyn Museum's "posse" is madly tagging, flagging and organizing projects digital photos...

• February 26, 2010
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New Tools for Mapping News

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Want to illustrate a story by displaying data on a map? Don't have a team of whiz kids at your fingertips? One good option has long been IBM's Many Eyes. Their maps, however, stop at the state level. Not especially helpful if you cover local politics! I haven't struggled too much with maps lately, but a tweet from Sunlight Labs' Clay Johnson caught my eye this morning, nonetheless. I think that what got my attention was that Clay directed his nudge to Nathan Yau, a bottomless well of great data visualization insights and tutorials if ever there was one. He...

• February 17, 2010
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How Could News Organizations Manage Documents Better?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

How are you handling primary source material on your website? OaklandLocal is summarizing a new report on a shootout in March that left five people dead. They use Scribd to embed reports directly on their site, but can't provide annotations. California Watch is looking at what campaign season generosity bought for agribusiness in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. They put together a great Flash widget that highlights noteworthy portions of the documents they reviewed, but they had to sit down with a highlighter, circle relevant passages, and then scan each document for the site. ProPublica, the Los Angeles Times, ABC...

• January 21, 2010
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Big Apps Are Here

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've already voiced my own suspicion that New York City's Big Apps competition is a deft end-run on an actual open data bill in New York City. Nonetheless, some 85 applications built on the city's currently public data sets are available now to explore and vote on through early January. They include a handful of legislator lookup tools and an unexpected number of park spot finders. There's also a graffiti finder designed for the curious dual purpose of helping steer both Wildstyle fans and the city's Anti-Graffiti Unit paint trucks straight to new throw-ups. Other gems that I've been watching...

• December 18, 2009
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DocumentCloud Releases More Code, Continues to Attract Developer Interest

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A public beta of DocumentCloud, one that journalists can kick the wheels on and upload documents to, won't be ready for a few more months, but work is continuing apace in our corner of the cloud. We've released a handful of code that comprises some of the components of our big picture, and it is great to see how well received our work has been by the Ruby and JavaScript communities. Last week we hit a little milestone: more than 1,000 developers are watching DocumentCloud projects on Git Hub, which is pretty cool. The advantage for us is that many...

• December 10, 2009
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Staffing Up DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months ago (three, to be precise), I quietly announced that I'd be leaving Gotham Gazette for parts unknown. I wasn't making that up about "parts unknown," but my announcement did get a few conversations started. The most interesting one turned out to be with Eric, Aron and Scott, who persuaded me to join DocumentCloud as their program director. I'm pretty thrilled to be joining them: I care a lot about software freedom, improving access to information, and making great software accessible to small organizations. DocumentCloud gives me a great opportunity to approach access to information from a different...

• November 11, 2009
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Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut back on our electric use or start generating a lot more power. Our game lets people explore the options that are on the table, along with a few that aren't. Should the city ban air conditioning? Harness the tides? Go nuclear? Warning: the game is...

• September 30, 2009
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Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When he's not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can't tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I can tell you that when it comes to local reporting, improved access to information could make a big dent in the expense of getting a story written. If you want to take a look at distribution of discretionary funds by the New York City Council, you have to start with a 400-page PDF full...

• September 9, 2009
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EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
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Source Code for Balance

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets. Assuming we haven't made any terrible mistakes (I already spotted one little error. If you spot it too you can buy me a beer!), we'll post cleaned out versions of the other games we've developed in the next week or...

• August 10, 2009
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Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work. It is everywhere these days, and it certainly is one way that we can be turning the Internet into a really effective reporting tool. Two new projects I'm watching? Adopt-a-Stimulus -- which I first caught wind of on Twitter -- asks individuals to pick one TARP project and track it. Steve Katz tried...

• July 15, 2009
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Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette released our fourth game in our Knight-funded game series this week. Bump, which revisits the maze theme from our Budget Maze sends players through a whole new labyrinth: ballot access. If you can't imagine how ballot access is even remotely interesting, I suggest playing the game! Seriously: we knew we wanted to do two things: to build a game that would stay relevant through the New York City campaign season and to find a topic that would fit nicely into the existing code base for one of our earlier games. Ballot access is an important and relatively obtuse...

• July 8, 2009
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Another Budget Game

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I like to think that Gotham Gazette's Balance! inspired the folks over at the Washington Post to create an even better budget game of their own but I am open to the possibility that they came up with it all on their own. Take a look at both if you haven't already. The Post's works a lot (a lot!) like our game, but I'd say the layout that they came up with is a far more effective way to display the available information. On the other hand, I really like the way we handled revenue, by creating a menu of...

• June 29, 2009
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Stuck in a Maze

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, we were honored with an Honorable Mention in the first Knight News Game Award competition, for our (pretty excellent) budget maze. The honor was made sweeter with the knowledge that our little maze -- we estimate the budget at $65,000 -- was up against a massively multi-player multi-issue networked news game project with a budget just over tenfold ours. With competition like that, an Honorable Mention is honor a-plenty. All the finalists in the contest were invited to share their games at the Games for Change Expo where I watched a handful of people play our game for...

• June 12, 2009
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Media Cloud and Calais

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Berkman Center launched a project called Media Cloud this week, a toolkit that facilitates analysis of trends in the news. The sample visualization on the site now shows world maps that illustrate the number of mentions each country got in Talking Points Memo, the New York Times and the BBC, respectively. I, of course, immediately tried to create a visualization comparing Gotham Gazette to a few other local papers. Lo, though: no Gotham Gazette in Media Cloud. I've been hearing about Calais lately. I at least got the memo that I'm supposed to know what it is. I gather...

• March 12, 2009
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Ease of Use Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We spend a lot of time talking about why people don't comment more on Gotham Gazette stories. By "a lot of time," I actually mean about 20 minutes every three weeks, but nonetheless as a project with a mission to improve public discourse and engage New Yorkers in public policy conversations, we gauge our impact in part by how many people are reading and responding to our reporting. When popular blogs reference our reporting we see lively and contentious conversations. But rarely do we get much discussion on our own site. This week, though, I made an interesting discovery. After...

• March 11, 2009
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Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This one is for the "wish I'd thought of that" files. Brian Boyer at ProPublica got the bright idea to write a wee widget that uses Versionista to track changes to a handful of White House websites including whitehouse.gov. Since I heard about Change Tracker on Twitter I've been following it on Twitter. They're still getting their bearings: I was surprised to see that the biography of Andrew Jackson was edited on March 4. and couldn't resist looking up the edit, which turned out to be a change to the site navigation. Not all that interesting. Luckily, ChangeTracker had a...

• March 6, 2009
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More Thoughts on TimesOpen

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to. It was a day well spent, but not a day spent hacking. Fair warning: I wasn't trying to capture the essence of the day so much as taking notes that struck me as relevant to my own work, with an emphasis...

• February 23, 2009
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Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a series of false starts on an energy consumption game we decided to skip ahead to a timely game of balancing the budget . The game is actually a reprise of a popular budget balancing game we created in 2003 -- we're regularly asked for the source code for that game, and while we do have it, it is a bear of a maze of a mess that no self-respecting programmer would want to try to wade through in search of numbers and texts to change. For this game, we did use Flash, which made it significantly easier to...

• February 12, 2009
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Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps. Speaking of EveryBlock, they recently announced that they're working with the New York Times to track Times reporting on political districts. Presumably they'll be taking advantage of the...

• January 29, 2009
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Who's Watching the Elections?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct. Every election, we also provide a roundup of basic information for voters: how to find your polling place, voting rights, special instructions for first time voters. And, who to call to report problems at the...

• October 24, 2008
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Wiki Our Next Segment

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was pretty sad when Radio Open Source went off the air, because I thought they were tugging at the loose threads of something interesting, and they never got to properly unravel it. Breaking news and reporters getting leads from the short message service Twitter are interesting phenomena but I don't think they can create the kind of community that you need to bring an audience into reporting. Radio Open Source never quite got it -- they had great comments but the community stayed tiny. Still, they were breaking new ground. I've been keeping an eye on The Takeaway for...

• September 24, 2008
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Public Information Done Right

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we're passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC's astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither. I made the trip to find out more. While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live...

• September 10, 2008
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Maps Worth Looking At

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette learned this week that two of our recent projects, Who's Running for What and The Garbage Game were listed among the notable Knight-Batten entries this year. Most notably, that means we aren't finalists. Some of the finalists, though, are pretty noteworthy. One I hadn't seen before is JD Land, which maps real estate development projects (proposed, completed and underway) in Washington DC's Southeast area. It is pretty smart stuff, and it reminded me that I've been looking for an excuse to point people to another mapping project that has really taken off: Habitat Map is a crowd sourcing...

• August 6, 2008
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Games with Legs

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've gotten a small handful of emails commending me for my fine work on our latest game, the NYC Voting Arcade -- the only problem is that we launched that game in 2004, long before I got here. We did link to it in a story earlier this week about state campaign filings, though, and the voting arcade games are altogether timeless (unless you happen to know that Doug Kellner left the city Board of Elections in 2005). This has gotten me thinking again about games, gaminess and complexity. Most of our voting arcade games are downright silly. Most of...

• July 17, 2008
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Using a Database to Track NY Politicians

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I asked a question that I'm still chewing on: what good is all this data ? Sitting the programmers down with reporters is a great advance over abandoning them to some cold dark dungeon, but I think we've got a ways to go to come up with really smart uses of data and database driven content. So, here's one idea: what about a database that tracks local representatives and their plans once they've been pushed out by term limits: the next election will see the first term-limits enforced turnover on New York's City Council. Here's what...

• April 17, 2008
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What Good is All This Data?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine a website that would show you, not just how many copies of some book are available for sale from Amazon, but which libraries near you carry the book. Oh wait, that already exists . Between WorldCat and Steven's thoughts on the Sacramento Bee salary database I'm thinking a lot about what really good data driven content looks like. How could we, as news reporters, use our readers as more than passive observers in meaningful ways. WNYC has been doing some interesting work with crowdsourcing and I'd like to see some ideas for introducing the concept to public salary databases...

• March 19, 2008
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Is it a Game Without Moving Parts?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience. As I've noted here before, the game design field isn't exactly awash in programmers eager to work in anything but Flash. We found a local programming shop that was game for the challenge, though, and sat down with them to iron out our technical specifications. They'd never worked in OpenLaszlo before, but it looked like...

• March 3, 2008
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