I Spent Six Years Running a News App Tracking Executions in America
Adapted from a Twitter thread I put together when we ended The Marshall Project’s long-running feature, The Next to D...
Photo Credit: Chelle
Photo Credit: Chelle
Adapted from a Twitter thread I put together when we ended The Marshall Project’s long-running feature, The Next to D...
Cross-posted from OpenNews’ Source blog. There are few newsroom cliches more stale than the one that says “every nigh...
Cross-posted from Open News’ Source blog. In the days before the World Cup’s knockout stages, with their potential fo...
Adapted from a lightning talk I gave at ASNE’s Hacking News Leadership conference in Austin, Texas in May. You can se...
Cross-posted from OpenNews's Source blog. This piece ran a few days after the closure of my employer, Digital First M...
Cross-posted from the Sunlight Foundation's OpenGov Voices blog.A few weeks ago, Hack Jersey brought a group of journ...
Today, I had a chance to speak at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Region 1 Spring conference, held at Rutger...
It all started in September, at the Online News Association’s conference in San Francisco. I crashed the #wjchat part...
At this week’s computer-assisted reporting conference in Louisville, IRE has me doing double-duty. In addition to my ...
At IRE’s computer-assisted reporting conference this week in Louisville, I am once again teaching a course on using O...
Update: In mid-December, I led two days of training in data journalism techniques for my colleagues at the New Haven ...
There are few things more frustrating than trying to get a simple spreadsheet from a government agency and being told...
This is another in the series of “Best Practices” posts from my archives from the Herald News. This was also written ...
It seems odd in 2012 that in some newsrooms the data journalists don’t get the same kind of credit for their work tha...
Sometimes, especially after a particularly trying election night, it starts to feel like we may be suffering from pos...
Back at the Herald News, several of the editors and reporters wrote a regular series of columns for the newsroom call...
Updated: I added the link to the rough cheat sheet of handy and common Refine tasks at http://bit.ly/ire12refinecheat...
Updated on 6/23: I’ve included, marked by an asterisk, several fantastic checklist suggestions offered by David Donal...
We have a job opening up on our CAR team here at The Star-Ledger.I’m not even going to try to compete with Matt Doig’...
About six months ago now, I started a new job, taking over as The Star-Ledger’s Computer-Assisted Reporting Editor. F...
1.Write tight. Maybe the most important thing you can do to increase your productivity without doing more work is to ...
The way to keep your politicians honest, or even better to prove whenthey’re being dishonest, is to have the right pa...
These notes on how to cover municipal finance and budgeting were compiled from several discussions over the years wit...
The accuracy checklist is intended primarily for beginning reporters ondaily stories, but its reminders can be useful...
After yesterday’s discussion, some might ask the obvious question: aren’t there already people doing this?I don’t int...
As anyone who’s stumbled upon my Twitter feed can tell you, I’m a soccer fan whose zeal for the sport approaches fana...
A few months ago, I was laid up for a few days recovering from knee surgery. I spent most of the time lounging on the...
Things have been pretty hectic over the last year. The Local News Service is fully staffed and running at full steam....
As with many things on this site, it’s taken me a little while to get around to posting this note.In February, after ...
I’ve been trying to get to this post for about a week, but the news cycle has been a bear lately.Here in Passaic Coun...
After years of hearing about it and after months of hearing friends and loved ones raving about it, I’ve decided to t...
The nature of the news business, and the 24/7 demand of following the world of futbol, keeps me more than busy much o...
I read a lot of nonfiction, literary and otherwise, and I recently finished one of the better books I’ve found on Ame...
For those very few of you who have been missing my byline (hi, Mom and Dad!), I have good news. The Herald News’ socc...
From time to time, you read about journalists being imprisoned in far-off countries for doing their jobs. Only rarely...
Before attending a job fair to interview journalism students and aspiring reporters, be sure to update your Web site....
Some people spend years trying to learn our craft, spending thousands on graduate schools. Others just go where the n...
On Tuesday, we lost a colleague and an accomplished journalist when Jonathan Maslow died.Plenty of others have alread...
I’ve been putting off posting here for weeks, hoping inspiration would strike, or I would suddenly find a bounty of f...
While I use Google News fairly regularly–particularly its e-mailed news alerts), I never noticed the new “comments fr...
My former colleague Yoni Greenbaum has entered the journalism blogging arena, and he recently added his philosophy ab...
I’ve been out of the daily reporting loop for months now as I fill in as an editor, but I have been involved in one c...
One of my grammatical pet peeves is the abuse of quotation marks. I see it often in my daily life, but as I’ve been e...
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in recent years about the bleak future of journalism in general and of newspapers...
From the shameless self-promotion department, here’s a couple of nice stories we ran this weekend that I had a hand i...
A friend just alerted me to Kirix Strata, a Web browser that will let you work with raw data as you see it on your fa...
Although you probably wouldn’t know it from the minuscule bit of coverage it has received thus far, the Women’s World...
I once heard an editor compare working in New Jersey to hunting in a game preserve. Much like their cousins in South ...
In this era of spam and astroturf, not all readers of the blog are the same. I had a new user visit and register rece...
For weeks, I’ve been planning this post, my paean to Jack Kerouac and the influence he had (along with the likes of E...
Here’s one good reason why “U.S. Americans” need more good maps in their newspapers and online.(Courtesy of Boing Bo...
It seems the Internet has done as much for amateur cartographers as it has for budding pornographers.As I promised ea...
As the newspaper industry struggles to ensure its relevance in the changing media landscape, there are a few pioneers...
In our rush to embrace the Web, it’s interesting to keep in mind some of the limitations the medium could impose on j...
One of the benefits of having no readers is that no one will be impatiently demanding that I have all my ducks in a r...
Please bear with me over the next few days. I’m in the process of moving this site from a free host to my own server....
Amidst the shock and tragedy of last week’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis, journalists around the country embraced t...
From my old Web site’s bio:There are times when I wonder what I’ve gotten into by becoming a journalist.When I spent ...
I can think of no better way to launch this new experiment in blogging than to sadly note the passing of an icon of A...