Structured data intro from MuckRock

[Michael Morisy]

Hi all!

I've been lurking on this list for a while, and probably will continue
to do so, but hope to write more about our own methods and would love
to compare notes

I've been running MuckRock, a FOIA/investigative news site, for five
years, and all of our work is systematically documented and
catalogued. We have data on over 18,000 public records requests, the
vast majority of which are publicly viewable:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/

We track all the meta data, including how quickly they're responded
to, how they were completed, page totals, etc, which made it easy to
generate agency and jurisdiction pages providing summary information:

https://www.muckrock.com/agency/united-states-of-america-10/federal-bureau-of-investigation-10/

https://www.muckrock.com/place/united-states-of-america/rhode-island/

We have an API that we occasionally use for meta-analysis, but we've
found that the data payoff we expected is slower than we expected:
Most of our work is just plain stories built on documents, and visits
to landing pages for places and agencies is just about 3% of our total
traffic.

I think the former problem is due to our own focus, and the latter due
to a lack of SEO, both of which we hope to tackle going forward, but
by making the UI really nice and making it easier to actually use our
FOIA CMS rather than filing outside of the site means that we were
actually able to take what we've built and make it our business model:
We partner with a variety of other newsrooms and other organizations
who use MuckRock to file and track their requests, and we get an even
wider perspective on the state of public records around the country.

Been really enjoying the discussions, and hope to chat more.

- Michael