The amount of places that journalism has taken me added one more state Friday.

On that day, I spoke for about an hour to about 70 journalists about the power of data journalism and how they can implement some strategies in their own newsrooms.

The investigative journalism workshop was thrown by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) and hosted by the Oklahoman. You can find the long-form description here.

The group of speakers was very diverse and the crowd seemed to be very interested in what we all had to say.

In preparing my presentation, I had to decide how technical I wanted to go. For the most part, I was talking to seasoned journalists who have never even seen Terminal on their computer. I hoped to stress the importance of data and tools to rein in that data for a story.

I also hoped to emphasize tools that journalists could utilize for free and that could be used with various levels of programming experience. I talked about everything from database managers (like MySQL and PostgreSQL) to mapping tools (including Google Fusion Tables and Leaflet) to DIY data journalism (APIs and Github) and everything in between.

Based on the response I got, I think I did a good job. In talking to the person in charge of workshop surveys, there were two main things that came through when people evaluated me:

1. People loved what I had to say. A lot of attendees took a lot of value from my presentation, with one person telling me that it was like a “Christmas list for free (data) toys.”
2. My presentation went over some heads. This was probably inevitable, but I always wish I can accommodate everyone. That said, these people seemed interested in what I was saying, even if they didn’t fully understand it.

I’ll take that. I had great conversations with some folks afterwards that wanted more. I was happy to oblige and happy to see that so many people are interested in the marriage of journalism, data and programming. I’m a nerd in that respect, so it’s always nice to chat with other nerds.

I really enjoyed my first speaking engagement on data journalism and I hope that I’ll be afforded the opportunity to preach data to journalists again in the near future.

From OKC to Helsinki

If you happened to follow my tweets, you’ll know I spent about 17 more hours in Oklahoma than I had intended to. I loved Oklahoma, but the airport just wasn’t working for me.

After having my original flight delayed to the point that I’d have missed my connecting flight, Delta put me on a same-night same-time flight. That one wound up getting canceled due to mechanical issues and so I collected my $50 voucher and spent the night in town on Delta.

The next morning, I woke up early and got to the airport for my 5:30 a.m. flight, which was overbooked. Instead of getting on with my guaranteed ticket, I volunteered to get on a later flight, took my $400 flight voucher and went back to the hotel to sleep.

I got home much later than expected, but I did it $450 in free flights the richer, so I made the choice to go to a conference I otherwise never would have been able to attend.

That conference is the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, Finland. These vouchers will pay for more than half my plane ticket and with a low admission price (100 Euros for four days), it’s hard to pass up.

Touted as the “Open Knowledge & Data event of the year,” I am very much looking forward to it. It’s during the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco, so  I’m not sure how many journalists will be there. Regardless, I feel like I’ll learn a lot.

In order to fund the remainder of the trip, I’m going to be looking for grants for educational travel. If anyone knows of anything that might apply, let me know.

As for now, I’m going to catch up with everything I intended to do yesterday before my travel got delayed.

Jul 15, 2012 | Conferences, Data Journalism, Investigative Journalism, Travel
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If anybody has a working pair of legs they’re not using, let me know. I need a replacement after running around all week for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference in Boston.

For a conference with a 75:1 attendee to staff ratio, I think the conference went rather swimmingly. This iteration of IRE’s annual conference was the largest since 2003, and possibly the second largest ever. With three full jobs boards, it would appear that investigative journalism is not only alive and well, but is thriving.

Throughout the week, I met a lot of great people. I learned early on in my journalism studies that networking is a great way to get great jobs. There’s no better place than a conference to do just that. After attending my third conference in five months (NICAR in February, SABEW in March), I feel like I am very well prepared to get a greaat job when I graduate in a year’s time.

In fact, I got a soft part-time job offer for this summer, but I’ll provide more details in a future post if that soft offer becomes real work.

I sat in on quite a few panels and if I discussed everything I learned, it would take a long while. Even summarizing some of those things would take forever. If you are interested in learning what was discussed at the conference, look no further.

Video of some sessions can be found here, while Gannett had plenty of attendees blogging about a large variety of panels, found here. There were more than 60 bloggers, so the content is rather extensive and provides a lot of great insight for those who could not attend.

I’m going to finish this blog with an announcement that I’m very excited about. As many of you know, I’m working on an application for the Knight News Challenge for Data. While the application is not yet finished, I have big news about the project that I’d like to share:

My Knight Challenge, should it be accepted, will be backed by IRE once funding expires.

This is huge for the project and I am very excited about this development. I got a lot of great feedback from conference participants and I will let you know when it’s submitted.

That’s it and that’s all for now. There’s no rest for the weary as I’m back to work early tomorrow morning. I’m currently sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight back to Dulles and I can’t wait to get back and into a bed.

I’m going to do my best to catch up on sleep this evening before getting back to work and finishing up my proposal for the Knight News Challenge.

Jun 17, 2012 | Conferences, Investigative Journalism, Travel
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It’s Tuesday, and in a couple hours my week at work will be complete. However, my work this week is far from over.

Right about now, I’m preparing to fly out to Boston for the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference, hosted by the Boston Globe (whose newsroom I get to see tomorrow morning). I could just attend and sit back and enjoy, but instead, I’ll be serving as staff for a conference that will exceed 1000 attendees.

It’s a little daunting, given that the actual staff of the conference, excluding speakers, is 16 people. Luckily, the other 15 are some of the hardest-working people I know. I’m just around so they can hear me sing into the walkie-talkies again, a la the NICAR conference is February.

I’d like to tell you that the conference will be all fun and games, but a lot of work gets put in behind the scenes. Sure, the fun and games are omnipresent, they just take a well-trained eye to uncover.

This week, along with staffing the event, I will be keeping myself plenty busy.

I’m almost finished with my Knight News Challenge application and I will be tossing it by several people who know the challenge intimately for thoughts and suggestions. If anyone wants to add input, let me know via comment or twitter.

Alongside that, I have been paired with a “mentor,” who I will tell more about once I’ve met him, to discuss career paths and journalism in general.

Lastly, keep an eye out for my first Django-based app. I finally got the interface working on my Ubuntu virtual machine and I will try and get something up and running by week’s end.

That’s it and that’s all for now. I’m going to relax this evening in beautiful Boston and prepare my mind for the challenges ahead.

Jun 12, 2012 | Conferences, Investigative Journalism, Travel
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My trip to New York City was LEGEN…wait for it…

Six days in the Big Apple and my body is a little worse for the wear, but I’m still ticking. The week that passed was truly awesome in a lot of ways. Allow me to spin you a yarn.

Prologue

The whole reason I found myself in Manhattan was a class that I took (and aced) during the spring semester. The class, Business & Economics Reporting, includes a field trip to New York to visit real newsrooms, especially those that focus on, you guessed it, business reporting.

After moving out of my apartment, I embarked on a road trip back to the east coast in my trusty Rav 4. I made a few stops along the way.

The first night, I spent with friend and colleague Alison Matas, who is spending her summer as an intern at the Charleston (WV) Gazette. Check out some of her work here.

We took in the West Virginia nightlife, of lack thereof, and I have to say, Charleston is actually a nice little town. It’s quite beautiful along the Kanawha River.

The next morning, I departed and got lunch with my sister in Morgantown before settling down for the evening with my friend Kenny (read: Cartman) at his house in Northern Virginia.

Then, it was time to go to NYC.

Reason for the trip

Let’s begin by talking about the places that we visited. They are in the order we visited them:

• Business Insider
• American Banker
• NASDAQ
• Fox Business
• Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones
• Fortune Magazine
• Business Wire
• Good Morning America
• Bloomberg News
• CNN Money
• New York Stock Exchange
• Museum of American Finance
• Standard and Poors
• Huffington Post (which I missed, but more on that later)
• New York Times

It was a full slate to say the least. I could do a separate blog post on each of the places we visited, so if you’d like to know more about any specific site I visited, drop a comment and I’ll respond.

Perhaps the coolest experience I had was seeing just how many Mizzou alums were in each of the newsrooms. It really reinforces the idea of the Mizzou Mafia.

Handcuffed to a desk in NYC

NYC is seen as the capital of American Journalism, so I can’t say that I wouldn’t want to work there in the future. It seems that I’ve been given my chance.

When an executive editor says that he’d “like to handcuff you to a desk right now,” I have to imagine that I’m doing something right.

So what am I to do? I like to finish what I start, so I did not want to drop out of graduate school just two semesters away from completion. So I got creative.

I went to a meeting with an editor while my cohort visited the Huffington Post. I convinced the editor to let me do a remote internship in the fall where I show them what I’ve got. If I impress, they’ll let me do my professional project there. If I take it and continue to impress, there’s like a desk to which I can be handcuffed.

This would be a great situation anywhere, but the fact that it is at CNN Money is just top-notch in my book. I’ll get to do a little data reporting and some news apps creation, which is exactly what I want to do.

It was an exciting development and made the trip well worth it.

A grand finale

The last thing I did in New York was to see the Book of Mormon on Broadway. Unfortunately, I was unable to take any photos as that is against Broadway protocol, so to speak.

However, I can tell you that it was worth every penny (and I spent a lot of them) and more. It deserved all nine Tonys it won in 2011 and many more it did not win.

The show was funny from beginning to end and I really didn’t want it to come to a close. They say that all good things must come to an end, and while the show did, thankfully, the show should enjoy an enduring run on Broadway.

It had typical South Park humor, which was to be expected, and it was done to perfection. Sure, it can be very inappropriate at times, but it all worked and contributed to what was an absolutely phenomenal plot line.

I purchased the script after the show, so if anybody wants to give it a read-through, let me know. It’s a great read.

Postscript

While my adventures were over, the weirdness that is New York certainly was not. Sitting in JFK airport, waiting for my flight to DC, I was hit in the face by a rogue pigeon that the TSA must have let passed.

It was an odd ending, but I can’t complain. It was pretty awesome.

Oh, and before I forget…DARY.

May 26, 2012 | Business Journalism, Travel
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If you think that taking 12 credits in one semester of grad school is a good idea, think again.

This past semester, I decided to do just that and it pushed me to the edges of my mental capacity. I came out of the semester with a 3.925 GPA (3 As and an A-), but it was trying.

That being said, it is over. As a result, I will be back to blogging regularly. This summer should yield some pretty interesting blogs. Here are a few things you can expect to see this summer:

• My experiences working as an intern on the data team at USA Today;
• Blogs from the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Conference in Boston; and
• Q & As with friends who are interning across the United States (and maybe the world).

As for now, I find myself in the Mecca for journalism: New York City. Over the next four days, I will tour several journalism outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine and CNN Money.

Stay tuned for blogs on my experiences in NYC, mixed in with a few food reviews, I think.

As for now, I’m taking it back to 2007 and sleeping in a dorm room. It’s not glamorous, but it’s free.

May 20, 2012 | Grad School, Travel
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This weekend, I spent a little of my own money to go on a class trip with Bill Allen, a professor at the University of Missouri and former science writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

On Friday, 15 of us got into two vehicles and made our way west. The destination: Kearney, Ne. Early Saturday morning, we made our way to Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary in search of the infamous sandhill cranes and knowledge.

Throughout the day, we got to talk to locals about subjects like the cranes, and especially the TransCanada XL Pipeline. You’ll see more of that in a later blog. The trip was thoroughly educational and enjoyable, but the main attraction was saved for last.

At sunset that night, and sunrise the following morning, we hiked out to camouflaged blinds where we could view the cranes without frightening them. Because Nebraska is the only state that has outlawed the hunting of these birds, these blinds are the only place in the world that this type of crane activity can be observed.

The sunset viewing of the cranes was awesome, if only for the picturesque Nebraska sunset, with it’s deep oranges and purples. Seeing the cranes fly with that background was an immensely tranquil experience.

The next morning, we awoke at 4:45 a.m. (losing an hour because of Daylight Savings Time) and headed back to the blinds.

The following is an attempt to describe the indescribable, using my own observations as well as some images that my friend and colleague, Stuart Palley, graciously allowed me to use for my blog:

It’s a cool, dark March morning, and I find myself walking through the woods in southern Nebraska. I’m told we’re not allowed to use flashlights, which makes the half-mile walk all the more ominous.

As we get closer to our destination, the calls of birds can be heard at an ever increasing rate. But it’s not a normal bird call. At times, the cacophonous noise sounds like a drunkard doing endless donuts in a parking lot. Some calls stand out above the rest, sounding like harmonicas or herald trumpets.

Finally, we arrive at a camouflaged structure and step in to see square window holes in the plywood wall, of varying height, that show a portion of the Platte River that lies beyond.

It’s 6:23 and still dark out. Outside the windows, the river would be indecipherable if not for the water flow over creases in the riverbed.

Clearly visible in the water were dark black spots that appeared to be islands at first glance. As time progressed, however, it was clear that these were not islands in the traditional sense.

In the deceptively shallow river sat about 18,000 sandhill cranes, sitting in groups across the river. As we quietly wait in darkness, the anticipation builds. As the light increases outside, the cranes start to get louder. Perhaps more were awakening from their slumber.

When the sun is up, the cranes move around a little more. When they walk through the water, their movements appear very methodical and elegant. The movement is reminiscent of a bicyclist whose seat is too low and whose knees come up higher than you’d expect.

The cranes have white and gray feathers, with two notable exceptions. The underside of the wings was noticeably black, with the finger-like wingtips being the darkest. The other color was the head of the crane, around the eye and beak. Here, the birds sport a vibrant ruby red coat of feathers.

Some of the birds had odd coloring on some of their feathers. It looked as though their feathers had become rusty. I was told that this happens over time as birds fly through areas over and again.

Some display aggressive motions toward others in an attempt to establish dominance. It seems a lot like high school, with the birds trying to develop a sort of hierarchy.

All of a sudden, a sound hits the ears that sounds like thousands of screaming women who just witnessed the Beatles take the stage. A look to the west reveals a giant mass, blacking out the sky just over the horizon.

As this massive swarm of birds gets closer, the noise envelopes us. Despite the amplitude of the sound and the frightening sight of an approaching swarm, the mood is jovial as jaws approach the floor. When these cranes get overhead, many of the birds that had been sitting in front of us decide to join.

Many took off in our direction, and as they got closer, a distinct rumble could be heard. At first, it wasn’t clear what the sound was, but I soon realized that it was the sound of the cranes’ wings pounding against the air. It’s a simple sound, but since it’s rarely ever truly heard, it felt majestic.

Some birds decided to stick around for a bit, and we decided to keep an eye on them. As I prepare to leave our camouflaged enclosure, I witness the true majesty of nature.

One of the larger male cranes approaches a female crane and bows its head. Once it lifts its head, the crane does what appears to be a dance for the female.

The dance consists of a little hop and a few flaps of his fully extended wings. On top of the dance, he gives a few loud calls in the direction of the female.

The female reacts with a few burst of high pitch noise. The two turn and lift off the ground. They fly together toward the sun, ready to start anew.

Mar 11, 2012 | Travel
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