Patrick Cain, a CAR guy who became best know for his online maps at the Toronto Star, has produced a fascinating map of Toronto depicting the addresses of family of more than 3,000 people who died in the Second World War. It’s not journalism of the usual kind, but it will be of interest to…
A new Toronto Star series shows just how far computer-assisted reporting has come. Race Matters is a follow up the monumental 2002 Race and Crime project. Reporter Jim Rankin fought seven years to obtain several police databases and found police were three times more likely to stop and question blacks than they were to do…
A number of journalists filing requests for data to federal departments are finding the “data” has been converted to image files, quite literally pictures of data, prior to release. This has the potential to take access to electronic records back a decade if the trend spreads.
Once in a while software designers do something little that makes life a lot easier. The folks at Microsoft have done that by adding a shortcut command to remove hyperlinks from cells in Excel 2010. I’ve been testing the beta version to see what it offers for journalists. If you have ever cut and pasted some data…
Reporters who use Microsoft Excel to crunch government data have something to cheer about with the release of the beta version of Office 2010. A new add-in to Excel brings Excel’s ease of use to the analysis of huge datasets.
Love it or hate it, Microsoft Office is the king of the mountain when it comes to desktop spreadsheet and database software, and you’ll soon be able to have a close up look.
Check out this story from the Winnipeg Free Press on dirty restaurants. It’s a great example of how far we have come in doing this kind of probing journalism. The earliest reporters doing the restaurant story, and I was one of them, had to fight long battles with government officials just to get the data. Jen…
Computer-Assisted Reporting was a big part of this year’s winning Michener Award entry. The CBC and the Canadian Press teamed up to analyze Taser use by police officers across Canada, building a unique database from use-of-force reports obtained from police forces across the country. Read the press release from Government House here.The reporters analyzed the…
Reporters from across Canada are headed to Halifax for the second annual University of King’s College Summer School in Computer-Assisted Reporting.The school is sponsored by the Canadian Newspaper Association and is the only “boot camp” style CAR training available in Canada. CAR skills give you a leg up in today’s brutal journalism job market by…
There are some excellent statistical resources available to those working on swine flu stories…