Google, Twitter Team Up For Super Tuesday*
This just in from TrendStarks:
Google and Twitter are partnering to track Super Tuesday around the country. A live interactive map plots tweets.
Pretty cool.
Original post from Google.
Hyperlocal Achievement: LATimes.com Homicide Report Turns 1
My former colleagues at the L.A. Times noted a milestone in community reporting today: The Homicide Report has been active for a year.
Reporter Jill Leovy, who has been primarily responsible for the blog, wrote a feature about her efforts to record the facts of every homicide in Los Angeles, a city of an estimated 3.8 million.
“None of the more ambitious stories I’d previously done for the paper seemed quite as effective as simply listing victims, one by one by one,” Leovy wrote.
The project has become a magnet for the community and is often cited as an exemplar of online journalism, one that is both uncomplicated (a blog and an interactive map) and powerful.
Online, The Homicide Report caught the attention of other sites, including
- BlogHer
- Martin Stabe and his Fleet Street 2.0 blog
- Journalistopia
- LA Observed
- The New Yorker
- NPR (not once but twice), and
- Yahoo’s “People of the Web”
But perhaps more significantly, readers responded to the Times’ efforts in a visible way. By offering a dispassionate view of murder in the city through the map, and a place for the public to comment and mourn in the blog, LAT did a service for its community, one that was rewarded with frequent site visits and comments.
I’m told visits to the blog alone numbered in the hundreds of thousands, making a case for news organizations to put time and resources into similar local projects that meld traditional, skillful, locally focused reporting with imaginative online execution.
What are some of your favorites? Do you have a project you’d like to share? Feel free to post a link and your story in the comments.
Leading Indicators, Or Following the Iowa Caucus*
So here we are, a few hours and counting down to what will be the first test of online national campaign coverage.
The Des Moines Register has a great homepage headline: “All Eyes on Iowa.” And it looks like the public has been busy commenting on articles and the blogs in the caucus section.
Iowa Public Radio and WNYC in New York are joining forces for live, two-hour coverage, beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Central.
While most major news outlets are likely to be reporting returns as the Associated Press feeds them, the can’t-wait generation can look elsewhere for live updates. Townhall.com is trying an experiment in live coverage by the public, asking readers to Twitter, email or text message insider reports of last-minute efforts before polls open.
Townhall will be aggregating the information on its Twitter feed, IowaCaucus. Twitter members who’ve said they’ll be live-tweeting or sending in early return results include podcastmama, thepunk and smalleraperture.
Cody Marx Bailey, who’s in College Station, Texas, has built a Google map, where he plans to post live return information.
It’s been estimated that only 100,000 Iowans will help determine the front-runners for the presidential election. In years past, when there was some time between Iowa and the New Hampshire primary, the Iowa caucus acted as a leading indicator, letting the public know how those in rural states might vote, and letting campaign donors know who to throw their money behind.
With the Wyoming Republican primary on Jan. 5, and the New Hampshire primaries on Jan. 8, Iowa may not have as much pull. Nevertheless, tradition dictates we pay attention. Good luck to the candidates and to those pulling together online coverage.
*Update: In addition to the pretty cool interactive primary tracker described last month, LATimes.com has the names of the top five candidates floating in a so-called vote cloud on their homepage. The returns data comes straight from AP, but it’s a nice way of visualizing it.
Countdown to the Primaries
You’ve probably been blocking it, but elections are about three weeks away.
Pollingreport.com has been keeping an updated list of national polls, including the most recent Newsweek Iowa poll, which show Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama leading the GOP and Democratic hopefuls, respectively.
The primary dates have been shifting around quite a bit, making this election particularly confusing for the public. Though the Federal Election Commission has a chart, several news outlets have come up with better ways to display the information — and the implications of the votes.
The Washington Post created an interesting bar graph that shows the ripple effect of the earlier primary dates, as well as a national map of the primaries by state and by date.
The Los Angeles Times does their take on the national map with a more elegant timeline of votes and caucuses. The design reminds me a bit of the FEC’s presidential campaign finance map.
Pollster has a plot graph, that tracks the candidate’s poll ratings. There’s a lot of data on each graph, though, so it’s a bit messy.
Rather than tracking, the New York Times does some explaining, with a map highlighting the early states, and a date and map chart of the Democratic and Republican races.
PBS’ Online News Hour and NPR have produced an interactive map that displays data state by state using mouseovers. Click on each state and you get additional information and related stories.
Ideas for Flu Season
Ah, flu season. Today, the New York Times reported reasons why the flu spreads more easily in winter. (WebMD ran a shorter story on the same topic in late October.)
By coincidence, the AP reported a story about flu vaccines being ruined by improper storage.
Since the flu shorts are top of mind — National Influenza Vaccination Week ended Sunday, you know — now might be a good time to think about health-related tools, such as a local map of who’s sick and where; where to get a vaccinated, who to turn to for answers and even a database on what local clinics have reported spoiled vaccines.
Just a thought.
