Database training with Derek Willis from the Washington Post

[Kara Andrade]

Chips Quinn Conference call
Databases with Derek Willis
June 25, 2007
Notes
 
Training on databases
 
Whether they know it or not, reporters have a lot of valuable information in their notebooks that doesn't get into stories. Derek Willis thinks that's a waste. The solution: Databases. Willis, database editor at The Washington Post's Web site, washpost.com, will be the presenter for the next Freedom Forum training conference call. The call is at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, June 25. Willis, a former reporter, will share ideas on what can be done with data online and how data can be used as a resource for story development.
Among the projects he has worked on is The Post's Campaign Tracker,
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008-presidential-candidates/tracker/
http://exch2003.freedomforum.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008-presidential-candidates/tracker/
 
Derek shares a few resources in advance of the call.
 
Reading:
 
http://www.jacobian.org/writing/2006/nov/08/breaking-news/
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/08/21/context-not-content-is-king/
http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307
http://www.mattwaite.com/2007/02/15/not-my-job-doesnt-exist-anymore-in-newspapers/
 
Databases:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/
http://www.chicagocrime.org/
 
There things in our newsrooms that wind up some place, but never get their intended use.
The amount of collecting and distilling information we are in a very real sense, the non-movie version of Ground Hog Day.
 
We also continue to engage in what among folks in the Pentagon call “stove piping of information” information which if given to select number of people.
 
 
Building a database is a way to enforce consistency to a story.
 
Book: Everything is miscellaneous by David Wineberger
 
The role of the end user being able to pull information from us.
 
Databases are a great example of this. We thought we knew how people would use it or want to use it. This is one of the things where newspapers don’t reflect the change. They select and vet information and take information away from the reader.
 
Readers use the Vote databases differently than we thought.
 
While we do Flash for quite a number of database things, but it’s very limiting. Most of our databaes don’t have much of a serve function. Most people are bad searchers. You should give them an option to browse, see other church’s position on this to refer you to another set of database. Even XML is good at that. This is one of the advantages of having users browse rather than search.

Other tools that people can use to get familiar with databases:
 
(1) Excel is a nice gateway drug to this sort of thing
(2) Eventally you will run up against limitations. The first thing is some sort of database, Access or whether that’s something beefier, like MySQL or PostGress which are all open source databases. Even this does not allow you to do everything you want to do. Python is his tool of choice, named after Monty Pynthon which he highly recommends. Good for scraping or grabbing information off the web.