Idea Lab

U.S. Government Should Publish All Mortgages It Buys

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It appears that the United States government is going to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages in an effort to prevent the collapse of the world's financial system. If they do, I'd like them to publish a list of all of the mortgages they purchase -- the loan number, the address of the property, the lender, the amount of the loan, the status of the loan, the plaintiffs and defendants in any associated foreclosure cases, and so on. As far as I can tell, it's not currently possible for the public to determine the underlying assets...

• September 24, 2008
• 1 comment

Government Data: File Not Found

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this month the district attorney in Albany, New York, released thousands of pages of documents related to his investigation of a scandal involving former Gov. Eliot Spitzer. This goes back to the days when Spitzer's alleged improprieties involved misuse of the state police, over-the-top aggressiveness and a lust for smearing political opponents. Not as titillating as the governor's later transgressions, perhaps, but still of interest to those of us who follow the sad state of government in the Empire State. State political reporters salivated -- until they heard how DA David Soares was issuing the material. Instead of putting...

• August 25, 2008
• 2 comments

Coder-journalist: Governments Should Open Up Their Data

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Mark, one of the first two winners of our journalism scholarships for computer programmers, wonders why it's so hard to get usable government data. I wrapped up my second quarter of journalism school and my daily reporting class a couple of weeks ago. Learning firsthand what goes into a simple news article gave me a new-found respect for the work that's required. Making call after call, leaving messages with people who will never call you back, and then taking notes while paying attention to what somebody is saying is quite a difficult way to spend a day. The Internet...

• July 10, 2008
• 2 comments

Open Government Data and the EveryBlock Project

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we're experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It's a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data. The two objectives: Get more datasets for EveryBlock so it can be a better Web site Convince governments to share that data with everyone, not just us can lead to some cognitive dissonance in the minds of government leaders. They have...

• May 1, 2008
• 4 comments

What Will Journalist- Programmers Do?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most common questions I've gotten about our journalist/programmer scholarships comes from news organizations: "When can we hire them?" And recent developments suggest that the need for people with both journalism and programming skills is only going to increase. For Northwestern's Readership Institute blog, I wrote last week about the growing number of data-driven applications being published on news Web sites. I used the Indianapolis Star's Data Central as a case study. It's worth pointing out, though, that the paper was able to publish most of these databases without involving professional programmers. This reflects one of the driving...

• November 18, 2007
• 2 comments