Share, interact with data easier with a PANDA in your newsroom

By Coulter Jones

Tucked away on reporters' computers are dozens of details that could benefit news coverage, if only other journalists knew where to look.

Newsrooms are swimming in data. Journalistic organizations big and small continue to collect data from local, state and federal governments, and dozens of other places. As the collection grows, making sense of that information can become more difficult.

That's what the PANDA project, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, wants to solve — make data analysis easier for journalists and make sharing data within a newsroom less complicated.

"We want this thing to work for all levels of organizations, regardless of what they can afford," PANDA's developer Christopher Groskopf said. "We want to be able to scale down really small. Small news organizations can run it on somebody’s desktop if they need to."

Groskopf, formerly a news applications developer at the Chicago Tribune, is PANDA's only full-time developer. Tribune news applications editor Brian Boyer, Tribune news applications developer Joe Germuska and Ryan Pitts, digital media editor for the Spokane Spokesman-Review, put together the news challenge proposal. They were part of the team that built census.ire.org. PANDA, like DocumentCloud, was an independent project, but is now part of IRE.

The idea for PANDA is to give news organizations a central location to upload data — voter registration rolls, restaurant inspections, teacher salaries — where it can be searched, analyzed and exported. If it sounds familiar, it's because the concept isn't new. Intranets, or internal searchable databases, have been a part of newsrooms for decades. IRE has been teaching how to set up an intranet since the mid-90s. 

But intranets can be hard to install and difficult to scale. PANDA is designed to eliminate some of the initial hurdles, particularly for smaller newsrooms that don't have full-time developers on staff. PANDA was born out the Tribune's own intranet. Former Tribune CAR reporter Darnell Little, now at Northwestern University, created DAVE, which allowed reporters to search about 10 databases collected by the paper. In trying to add features to DAVE, the Tribune development team decided that a new system was needed.

Read the whole post on the On the Road blog.

Special Events at the 2012 NICAR Conference

Hands-on training with Tableau

Learn how to visualize data fast and publish it interactively to the web without programming.

Tableau Public will host two, four-hour hands-on training sessions Thursday, Feb. 23, at the CAR Conference on how to use the free software to visualize data and post it online. The sessions will cover the basics of Tableau to create interactive data visualizations on short deadlines, as well as how to create more complex visualizations.

There is no additional cost for these sessions, but because of limited space pre-registration is required. Learn more about the session or reserve a seat for this training on the hands-on classes page.

Liberate the data with Scraperwiki

IRE and ScraperWiki are hosting a 12-hour data liberation marathon during the CAR Conference from 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, to 6 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 24.

The experts from Scraperwiki will be on hand to lend their expertise and their platform. Nominate a data set to liberate.

Follow the Money — Tracking Companies' Influence on Politics

Come to a free Reynolds Center workshop on Wednesday, Feb. 22, the afternoon before the CAR Conference. Bring the name of a company you follow to this workshop and learn how to track its efforts at political influence from two experts:New York Times reporter Ron Nixon and Sunlight Foundation editorial director Bill Allison. 

For more information and to register for this free training, visit the Reynolds site. You must register in advance to attend this training.

Upcoming IRE Training

Better Watchdog Workshop
January. 27, 2011 — Biloxi, Miss.

  We’ll offer several of our core sessions that will improve your ability to find information on the Web quickly, point you to key documents that will help you produce quick-hit enterprise stories and give you tips on the best approaches when conducting interviews or developing sources.

Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference
Feb. 23-26, 2012 — St. Louis

Election Watchdog Workshop
Feb. 10, 2012 — Washington, D.C.

Better Watchdog Workshop
March 3-4, 2012 — Spokane, Wash.

Better Watchdog Workshop
March 3-4, 2012 — Stillwater, Okla.

Better Business Watchdog (CAR for Business Journalists)
March 15, 2012 — Indianapolis

CAR Boot Camp
March 25, 2012 - March 30, 2012 — Columbia, Mo.

Continue to check online for more training events.

Free training opportunities

Learn at your desk with FREE webinars from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.

Investigating Private Companies and Nonprofits, Jan. 23-26, with instructors Chris Roush, University of North Carolina, and Ron Campbell, Orange County Register.

How Not to Be Bamboozled by Local Economic Studies, Feb. 8-9, with instructor Sarah Cohen, Duke University.

This is a selection of the jobs available in the IRE Job Center.

• Senior Officer, Research and Writing, The Pew Health Group, Washington, D.C.
• Managing Editor, Newspaper Tree, El Paso, Texas
• Investigative Reporter, Newspaper Tree, El Paso, Texas
• Special Projects Producer, KXAN-TV, Austin, Texas
• Investigative Reporter, The Oklahoman and NewsOK.com, Oklahoma City
• Senior News Editor, Salon.com, New York or Washington, D.C.
• Business Reporter (Temp), New York Public Radio, New York
• Executive Director, Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, Iowa City, Iowa

And this is a selection of the recently-posted fellowships:

• Investigative Journalist Fellowship, Harvard University
• NIHCM Foundation Health Care Journalism Awards