Welcome to Analytic Journalism and Decoding the Political Race(s)
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*** To sign-up for the Three Tuesday sessions, click here ***
Weekly Topics and Session Notes:
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6:30-8+ p.m. Tuesday, 30 Sept. 2008- "Newspapers are a 'morning line' tip sheet. There's isn't enough room for what you need to know."
Newspapers can be a good jumping-off point for political knowledge, but these days they rarely have enough staff, staff time and space to really drill down into a topic. Ergo, it is increasingly up to citizens to do the research to preserve democracy and help inform voters. Tonight we will be introduced to some of the city, state and national web sites to help in our reporting and to a few digital tools (think "Bookmarks on steriods.") to help you save and retrieve what you find.
I-AJ and Political Races-Fall2008.ppt -
6:30-8+ p.m. Tuesday, 7 Oct. 2008- "How to track the data's flow upstream."
A web page and its data are not static events. (Well, usually they are not.) Web pages and digital data all carry "signs" of where they came from, who owns the site(s) and sometimes who links to the sites. We will discuss how investigators can use these attributes to our advantage, and also take a step back to consider the "architecture of sophisticated web searching."
II-AJ and Political Races-Fall2008.ppt
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6:30-8+ p.m. Tuesday, 14 Oct. 2008- "Yup, it IS about following the money. But how to make sense of those numbers?"
Every election season, new web sites come along that make it easier to follow the money -- election money. Tonight we will look at some of those and focus on how to get that data off the web site and into a spreadsheet. Then what? A short intro to slicing-and-dicing the numbers. (Even if you are a spreadsheet maven, please come and act as a coach.)
III-AJ and Political Races-Fall2008.ppt
Fee: $20 each session; $45 for three-session-series. Click here to enroll.
Story Ideas:
Resources:
Examine links in "Sidebar" in far-right column (Please add your own unique finds to those pages.)
Biography
Tom Johnson’s 30-year career path in journalism is one that regularly moved from the classroom to the newsroom and back. He worked for TIME magazine in El Salvador in the mid-80s, was the founding editor of MacWEEK, and a deputy editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His areas of interest are analytic journalism, dynamic simulation models of publishing systems, complexity theory, the application of Geographic Information Systems in journalism and the impact of the digital revolution on journalism and journalism education. He is the founder and co-director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism and a member of the Advisory Board of Santa Fe Complex.