Category / Innovation

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  • J-Source

    Northwestern Readership Institute on putting data online

    More and more news organizations are putting data online so readers can drill down to information relevant to them. I did it as part of a Hamilton Spectator series on restaurant safety in 2001, and it became the biggest traffic…
  • J-Source

    Football players big, and getting bigger

    Here’s a great example of the kind of enterprising story that can be brought to life with CAR, in any market. The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania gathered height and weight data on high school football players and found they just…
  • J-Source

    Police data kept secret in Ontario

    The Ontario Divisional Court has come down against media access to data held by the Toronto Police and the Provincial Weapons Enforcement Unit. Both decisions are based on fine slicing and dicing of the wording of the acts, and have…
  • J-Source

    Toronto Star series wins online journalism award

    Congratulations to Toronto Star reporter Jim Rankin, who along with a team at the paper, won the Online Journalism Award for service journalism. The award was presented at the Online News Association conference in Toronto in October. The paper won…
  • J-Source

    Kansas City Star probes deadly air bag failures

    Ever wonder how often air bags fail in cars? So did the Kansas City Star, and the answer was, far too often. The paper looked at U.S. fatal crash data, but since so many cars are common, the story could…
  • J-Source

    Transport Canada puts aviation data online

    Transport Canada has quietly posted a searchable version of its CADORS aviation database to its website. This is a huge change of course for the department after it spent four years keeping the same data out of public hands. Click…
  • J-Source

    CBC uses data to probe nursing home violence

    CBC’s investigative unit is at it again with a series of stories on violence in Canada’s nursing homes. The stories started airing on Marketplace October 17, and continued on CBC Radio the following week. This is a murky subject that…
  • J-Source

    FOI audit shows gov’t still keeping secrets

    By Fred Vallance-JonesWhen I sat down to crunch the raw data from the third annual CNA FOI audit, I hoped against hope that I’d discover a marked improvement in performance by Canada’s federal, provincial and municipal governments. Alas, I…