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:

• 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.

   

• 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."

   

• 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.)

   

Fee: $20 each session; $45 for three-session-series. Click here to enroll.

Story Ideas:

• Mining the voter registration data base

Resources:

• Campaign Contribution Data 

   

• National Political Index

  The National Political Index is a web site which provides an index of substantive political information for voters, political activists, political consultants, lobbyists, politicians, academicians, and media editors with a wide range of products, information, services, simulations, games, and polling in an interactive communications environment.  NB: Not complete or always up-to-date, but still a good jumpstation to political race resources.

   

• FiveThirtyEight:    There are several principal ways that the FiveThityEight methodology differs from other poll compilations: Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages. Secondly, we include a regression estimate based on the demographics in each state among our 'polls', which helps to account for outlier polls and to keep the polling in its proper context. Thirdly, we use an inferential process to compute a rolling trendline that allows us to adjust results in states that have not been polled recently and make them ‘current’.  Fourthly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952. The simulation further accounts for the fact that similar states are likely to move together, e.g. future polling movement in states like Michigan and Ohio, or North and South Carolina, is likely to be in the same direction.

• Fact-Checking Resources

   

• Internet Domain Registration Sites

• Laws and Definitions

• Election Results

• IRE and Excel Tip Sheets

• Tips for online searching

• State of New Mexico data (partial)

• Santa Fe City and County data

(Please add your own unique finds to this section)

• Center for Responsive Politics (aka "Open Secrets")

  Celebrating its 25^th year in 2008, the Center for Responsive Politics is the nation’s premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Center aims to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry and a more responsive government. CRP's award-winning Web site,

  OpenSecrets.org, is amongt the most comprehensive resource for campaign contributions, lobbying data and analysis. For other organizations and news media, CRP's exclusive data powers their online features tracking money in politics. CRP relies on support from a combination of foundation grants and individual contributions. The Center accepts no contributions from businesses, labor unions or trade associations.

   

• National Institute on Money in State Politics

  A nonpartisan, nonprofit organization revealing the influence of campaign money on state-level elections and public policy in all 50 states. Our comprehensive and verifiable campaign-finance database and relevant issue analyses are available for free through our Web site FollowTheMoney.org. We encourage transparency and promote independent investigation of state-level campaign contributions by journalists, academic researchers, public-interest groups, government agencies, policymakers, students and the public at large.

   

• Project Vote Smart

  This project is an historic undertaking. Citizens come together, not in selfish interest or to support one candidate over another, but to defend democracy. It is an extraordinary gathering of people committed to one purpose: to strengthen the most essential component of democracy -- access to information -- even as it suffers grave attacks from candidates and political parties, many who are now willing to manipulate information and deceive voters.  (Do you think there are only three, maybe four parties with candidates for president?  Go here to see otherwise.)