May 21, 2012 | 4:26 PM | By

Weekly Journalism News Roundup: Startup Success, NPR’s New Apps Team and Enterprise Reporting

Since you’re in the spirit of doing link roundups daily, we thought we’d gather some good reads on jour­nal­ism and entre­pre­neur­ship for you on a semi-regular basis. Check ‘em out:

This is What Startup News Suc­cess Looks Like – “Be customer-focused. Lis­ten to them and make what they want, not what you want.” Jour­nal­ism 2.0

Empha­siz­ing Enter­prise Report­ing – “Why it’s a vital part of a news outlet’s mis­sion, even in chal­leng­ing eco­nomic times. ” Amer­i­can Jour­nal­ism Review

NPR cre­ates news appli­ca­tions team as part of strat­egy for ‘mul­ti­me­dia audio’ – “NPR announced to staff Mon­day that it is cre­at­ing a team to build news appli­ca­tions and has hired the Chicago Tribune’s Brian Boyer to lead it.” Poyn­ter

May 21, 2012 | 3:46 PM | By

The StateImpact Fly-In 2012 Day One, Storified

For an intense Mon­day and Tues­day this week, reporters and news direc­tors from our eight StateIm­pact states are on the ground at NPR head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to dis­cuss where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Since so much is packed into sin­gle days, I’m break­ing up our Stori­fies into Day One and Day Two. Here­with after the jump:

Con­tinue read­ing →

FILED UNDER: About, StateImpact Fly-In, StateImpact Team, Storify
May 10, 2012 | 11:09 AM | By

Takeaways From Our Metrics Numbers: Frequency Breeds Success

Ed Jones / AFP/Getty Images

For­eign jour­nal­ists on their lap­tops in China.

Now that some of our states have been around for nearly a year, I took some time to look back at the month-by-month “oper­a­tional met­rics” we keep here at Team StateIm­pact. It mea­sures the num­ber of broad­cast fea­tures you’ve aired as part of StateIm­pact each month, in addi­tion to dig­i­tal posts, site vis­i­tors, pageviews and the month-by-month change in those numbers.

Some of the things that we’ve found:

Con­tinue read­ing →

FILED UNDER: Tips and Tools, Production, Writing
April 16, 2012 | 10:25 AM | By

StateImpact Wins Five Edward R. Murrow Awards in Four States

Con­grat­u­la­tions to StateIm­pact states of Idaho, Texas, Florida and Penn­syl­va­nia for rack­ing up wins in sev­eral cat­e­gories of the Radio-Television Dig­i­tal News Association’s annual Edward R. Mur­row Awards. (See full list of win­ners.)

StateIm­pact Idaho takes home a Mur­row in Region 1 for Audio News Series for Job­less in Idaho, an on-air and online explo­ration of sev­eral Ida­hoans who are out of work and look­ing for work.

StateIm­pact Texas’ ongo­ing drought cov­er­age, which was part of a pack­age of report­ing by KUT-FM in Austin, won for Audio Con­tin­u­ing Cov­er­age in Region 6.

StateIm­pact Texas’ Hous­ton sta­tion, KUHF-FM, also took home a regional Mur­row for Dave Fehling’s report “Not Under My Back­yard” in the Hard News Report­ing category.

StateIm­pact Florida nabbed an award for Audio Inves­tiga­tive Report­ing for its piece, “No Choice: Florida Char­ter Schools Fail­ing to Serve Stu­dents with Dis­abil­i­ties” in Region 13.

StateIm­pact Penn­syl­va­nia won for Best Web­site in Region 11, mark­ing another dig­i­tal win for StateIm­pact sites after pick­ing up blog­ging awards from the Edu­ca­tion Writ­ers Asso­ci­a­tion ear­lier this year.

Con­grats, these are all well deserved! And it’s quite an array of report­ing cat­e­gories we’ve won in, as well — hard news report­ing, inves­tiga­tive report­ing, series, web­site, con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age — it’s a tes­ta­ment to your many diverse tal­ents. Onward to June, to see how these regional win­ners fare in the national contest.

FILED UNDER: About, Awards, Edward R. Murrow
April 11, 2012 | 5:58 PM | By

How Not To Get Sued When Using Flickr

Flickr is a won­der­ful place to find images to illus­trate blog posts but we need to be mind­ful of a few rules that can keep us from get­ting sued for improper photo usage.

National Library NZ / Flickr

Her­bert George Ponting and a tele­photo appa­ra­tus in Antarc­tica, Jan­u­ary 1912

All Flickr images have an accom­pa­ny­ing license. You can find the image license by scrolling down the right hand side of the Flickr page. We can­not use images that have an “all rights reserved” license unless we have per­mis­sion from the pho­tog­ra­pher. The images that we can law­fully use with­out fear of get­ting sued are images des­ig­nated BY or BY/NC.

Flickr also has a vari­ety of col­lec­tions that are free use includ­ing The Com­mons and US Gov­ern­ment Works.

Cre­ative Com­mons (FAQ)

What Cre­ative Com­mons pho­tos can we use? 

  • Pho­tos with an “Attri­bu­tion” license — sym­bol­ized as “BY”
  • Pho­tos with an “Attribution-Non-Commerical” license — sym­bol­ized as “BY/NC”
Why can we only use these two licenses?
These are images that the pho­tog­ra­pher has said any­one can use, in a non-commercial man­ner, as long as we credit them exactly.
What can we NOT use?
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-No Deriv­a­tives — “BY/NC/ND”
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike — “BY/NC/SA”
  • Attribution-ShareAlike — “BY/SA”
How can I eas­ily find the right kind of photos?
An easy way to find pho­tos is to search the spe­cific Flickr cat­e­gories directly.
How can I tell the license type?
Click or hover on the “Some Rights Reserved” link asso­ci­ated with the photo. It should tell you the license type.
What if I really need to use a photo with a dif­fer­ent Cre­ative Com­mons license? 
You can con­tact the pho­tog­ra­pher directly and ask per­mis­sion to use it.
If you ever have any ques­tions about photo usage feel free to con­tact me: blettenberger@npr.org

 

April 9, 2012 | 4:25 PM | By

Data Tutorial: Converting PDFs To Spreadsheets

As we’ve all dis­cov­ered, many gov­ern­ment agen­cies pre­fer releas­ing records in portable doc­u­ment for­mat, or PDF. Some­times that’s help­ful, for exam­ple with nar­ra­tive text files. But not so much for data.

This tuto­r­ial will show you one free way to con­vert PDFs with tab­u­lar data into spread­sheets. The data I’ll use comes from a PDF I con­verted recently: The num­ber of sworn police offi­cers for the top 50 munic­i­pal­i­ties in the United States. Here’s what the file looks like:

You can’t copy/paste this text into a spread­sheet, unfor­tu­nately, and you don’t want to waste time or risk a cor­rec­tion by typ­ing the data man­u­ally. So let’s con­vert it.

Con­tinue read­ing →

FILED UNDER: Tips and Tools, Data Journalism, PDF to Spreadsheets
March 30, 2012 | 11:48 AM | By

Inside Our Latest News App: How It Works and How We Worked Together to Build It

Click the image to view the application.

A key part of the edi­to­r­ial mis­sion on the StateIm­pact project is to focus our sto­ries on how state pol­icy affects people’s lives. That’s true for for our dig­i­tal posts and our radio pieces, and also for our inter­ac­tive news applications.

In our lat­est news app, Dried Out, we visu­al­ized how a his­toric drought con­sumed Texas in 2011 and how the dry con­di­tions com­pared to recent mem­ory. But we paid as much atten­tion to the impact of the drought, which was dev­as­tat­ing, and on state pol­icy choices that could mit­i­gate future droughts, which might become more com­mon and more severe.

We sought to tell a story, in short, not just to wow read­ers with beau­ti­ful visu­als. (Though we hope to do that, too).

We con­tained the inter­ac­tive to one largely sta­tic page, and the result is some­thing approach­ing the van­ish­ing “dou­ble truck” news­pa­per lay­outs that con­tain lots of graph­ics, images and nar­ra­tive con­tent. We broke the story into four buck­ets: the his­tory, and the drought’s pro­gres­sion; the impact, and its dev­as­ta­tion; the pol­icy choices, and their lim­i­ta­tions; and the Tex­ans, who we hope will tell us their sto­ries. Con­tinue read­ing →

FILED UNDER: About, Tips and Tools, Data Applications, Data Journalism, Matt Stiles, News Interactives, Texas
March 26, 2012 | 11:57 AM | By

StateImpact Texas on the TV

Ter­rence Henry / StateIm­pact Texas

Ter­rence gets a credit on Newshour.

Con­grats to StateIm­pact Texas, whose relent­less cov­er­age of their state’s worst drought in his­tory led to a col­lab­o­ra­tion with PBS New­shour last week. It’s part of Newshour’s project that focuses on the impact of cli­mate change on com­mu­ni­ties across the coun­try. To tell the sto­ries, they are part­ner­ing with local pub­lic media in affected places.

StateIm­pact reporter Ter­rence Henry was even cred­ited as a pro­duc­tion assis­tant on the pro­gram, for his con­tri­bu­tions to the show (woot!). Here’s Terrence’s take, fol­lowed by video of the segment:

“For their first story, they wanted to look at how the drought has impacted Tex­ans, and what role cli­mate change played in that. They had been using our drought report­ing for research­ing their piece, and con­tacted us to see if we wanted to col­lab­o­rate on their story. So we helped them research their report­ing trip, iden­ti­fy­ing the best places and peo­ple to focus on, and shared our sources and con­tacts from our drought report­ing. We spent two days with them report­ing here, even con­duct­ing some of the inter­views. And we were able to share some b-roll from our rice farm­ers video that was used in the broad­cast as well. They’ve been putting up video seg­ments all week link­ing to us, and we’ve been embed­ding them and link­ing back in return. When the ten minute seg­ment aired on New­shour, StateIm­pact Texas was cred­ited dur­ing the lead-in and also given a pro­duc­tion credit.

All in all it was a great expe­ri­ence, bring­ing national atten­tion to both the issue and our report­ing. New­shour has also made avail­able addi­tional mate­ri­als that didn’t make the broad­cast that we’ll use for con­tent on the site in the weeks to come.”

Con­grats to Team Texas. Great job.

FILED UNDER: About, Collaboration, Drought, PBS Newshour, Texas
March 15, 2012 | 1:50 PM | By

StateImpact Florida Nabs Two Education Writers Association Awards

Scott Finn / WUSF

John and Sarah at work last summer.

Con­grats to John O’Connor and Sarah Gon­za­lez, win­ners in the Edu­ca­tion Writ­ers Asso­ci­a­tion National Report­ing Con­test. The team placed first in the jour­nal­ism blog­ging cat­e­gory, and sec­ond in broad­cast inves­tiga­tive report­ing for their piece, “No Choice: Florida Char­ter Schools Fail­ing to Serve Stu­dents with Dis­abil­i­ties.”

This is a huge honor and I know it’s only the start of all the awards your report­ing efforts will rack up in the com­ing months and years. From EWA:

EWA – the only pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion for mem­bers of the news media who spe­cial­ize in edu­ca­tion – each year rec­og­nizes excel­lence on the edu­ca­tion beat across mul­ti­ple media through its National Awards for Edu­ca­tion Report­ing. In print, radio, tele­vi­sion and online, the work of EWA award-winners reaches mil­lions, fur­ther­ing the association’s mis­sion of increas­ing the quan­tity and qual­ity of edu­ca­tion cov­er­age across the nation.

For this year’s con­test, our panel of judges has selected 61 win­ning entries from a total of 340 sub­mis­sions. The win­ner of the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Dis­tin­guished Edu­ca­tion Report­ing will be selected from among the first-place award recip­i­ents and will be announced at EWA’s 65th National Sem­i­nar in May.

Con­grats to John and Sarah and their edi­tors Dan and Scott. We’re so happy for y’all! Well deserved honors.

Related: StateIm­pact Florida is a Winner

FILED UNDER: About, Awards, Blogging, Education Writers Association, Florida, Investigative Reporting
February 23, 2012 | 12:12 PM | By

Five Beat Reporting Tips You Can Use

“Once a week, buy a key per­son cof­fee. Learn what they want from you before telling them what you want from them. When pos­si­ble, do inter­views in per­son. Build rela­tion­ships. While on a story, log con­tact info for good sources you meet.” — Erin Bar­nett, The Oregonian

Nor­man Rockwell’s “The Run­away” shows a beat cop talk­ing up a run­away child.

In our lat­est StateIm­pact webi­nar, our data­base report­ing coor­di­na­tor Matt Stiles gave us a run down of some things to keep in mind to really own your beat. Before he was a data nerd, he was a nerdy beat reporter. Stiles cov­ered fed­eral courts in Dal­las and City Hall in Hous­ton. Both had chal­lenges. The feds wouldn’t talk to him. And he couldn’t get the folks at City Hall to stop talk­ing to him.

As you know, beat report­ing is hard. The best beat reporters are orga­nized, they really care about a sub­ject and they’re ask­ing the right ques­tions. Some tips to remem­ber to own your beat:

1.) Be aware and be around.
The best beat cops are in din­ers and on street cor­ners meet­ing peo­ple and, in this case, per­haps dis­cov­er­ing a run­away. If he were out in his car, or back at the sta­tion house, he might not have seen this kid. Or looked close enough to rec­og­nize the pack on the floor. This kid might have got­ten away.

Con­tinue read­ing →

FILED UNDER: Tips and Tools, Beat Reporting, Matt Stiles, Sourcing, Webinar