Google Crisis Response created this interactive map showing weather, emergency shelters and power authorities.
 

As the East cost braced for Hurricane Sandy, data journalists across the country were working in realtime to spread the news. We gathered some of the interesting interactive coverage and data visualizations we found from around the web. Have a suggestion for our list? Send it to tony@ire.org or tweet us @IRE_NICAR.

• Timothy Barmann of the Providence Journal put together these maps and graphics tracking power outages in Rhode Island.
• Simon Rogers and John Burn-Murdoch created this interactive for The Guardian Data Blog showing ...

Three IRE members were awarded Knight Foundation grants that will create online resources for journalists.

The grants are part of six news innovations intended to improve access to information on local communities, air quality, elections, demographics and more that in total received $2.22 million as winners of Knight News Challenge: Data. The Knight Foundation said it sought ideas that make the large amounts of information produced each day available, understandable and actionable.

IRE member Joe Germuska of The Chicago Tribune and project partners John Keefe of WNYC and Ryan Pitts of The Spokesman-Review were awarded $450,000 to continue ...

ProPublica’s recent Opportunity Gap project brought together reporting on an important education issue – whether low-income students in public schools have equal access to advanced classes - statistical analysis and way-cool interactive tools.

The project used a new set of Department of Education data that tracked enrollment in advanced classes and special programs in public schools. This data is known as the Civil Rights Data Collection, which is compiled by DOE’s Office of Civil Rights.

The idea came from ProPublica education reporter Sharona Coutts, who got an early copy of the OCR data and wanted to see if there was ...

A new specialty in newsrooms is emerging that’s giving data new reach. It’s separate from computer-assisted reporting but shares much of the same DNA. Like CAR, it involves working intensively with data, but the end product is a web-based software application, not a story. A formal name for this field hasn’t completely gelled, but at ProPublica and some other newsrooms we call them “news applications.”

What are news applications? How do they relate to CAR? How can CAR nerds work with news apps nerds?

Simply put, news applications are journalism done with software development, much like photojournalism ...