The big news in data journalism this week was Nate Silver’s announcement that he’s leaving the New York Times and taking his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN. The chatteratti immediately weighed in: TIME credits Nate Silver with elevating data journalism to the level of “real reporting”, The Washington Post says that his genius lies in journalism, not math, and Salon asks whether Silver will be able to predict Oscar winners in the same way as a Presidential campaign.
The news app editors at ProPublica have developed another digital tool for your data journalism kit. Upton is a new open-source web scraping framework that makes web scraping easier by providing reusable components. (And it’s named after the great muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair!)
Some of the most useful and creative news apps, like WNYC’s Cicada Tracker, are conceived at journalism hackathons. Wired offers a few tips for coders and other hackathoneers to make sure you have protected yourself from legal challenges regarding IP rights.
In The Perils of Polling Twitter, a newsroom developer at the New York Times writes about some of the roadblocks to accurately gathering and visualizing data from social networks.
The Open Data Institute makes slides and audio from their Friday lunchtime lectures available to the public.
And finally, Noah Veltman, the 2013 Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow, has an awesome essay on his tumblr about Code, The Newsroom, and Self-Doubt, wherein he says that the collaboration between journalists and data scientists is like “one big journalism Justice League.”
Until next week…
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