Two interesting projects

[Chris Amico]

Hi all, been off the grid for a bit, but wanted to note two projects that look (to me) like structured journalism:

Next to Die, launched today by the Marshall Project and partners, tracks upcoming executions around the country. It's a smart approach to the beat, because it focuses attention ahead of a coming event. If anyone from TMP (or a partner) is in the group, I'd love to hear more about this and what you're planning.

The Endorsement Primary, from FiveThirtyEight, is a smart approach to covering the early primaries when no one is voting but endorsements show where the parties stand. It's an ongoing tracking project, and I've seen it referenced in other articles on the site (often as the "invisible primary"). Again, would love to hear more from any 538ers in the group.

A couple things I like about both of these:

 - The data was in plain site, but the value comes from organization and context. In other words, they're adding journalism, making data meaningful and telling ongoing stories with it. It's not, "Here, we visualized this thing that happened," but rather, "We're watching this and here's a way to understand it."

 - It's interesting even when the outcome is unknown. One thing I'm starting to see as a hallmark of structured journalism is that it allows us to say, "We think this will be important, and so we're going to track it," and to publish early instead of waiting until everything is settled. In both cases, there's almost always an interesting "where we are now" story, and then every change to that status quo is news.

[David Caswell]

I think both are excellent structured products, and I like your comments on the journalistic sense-making and 'reporter's notebook' aspects of structured journalism that they demonstrate. Given the resources, there are perhaps also other opportunities here to inter-link with related structured news products about the inmates, or politicians, endorsers, pac donors, etc.. 

I wonder if TMP have or anticipate an API.

[Bill Adair]

Thanks for pointing these out, Chris.

Yes, these are great examples of structured journalism. It’s great to see that the Marshall Project is partnering with legacy media, including my alma mater the Tampa Bay Times. It’s great for the legacy organizations to see how valuable this approach can be.

Bill Adair

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[Aviv]

Those examples remind me of things created via the "Silk" platform (silk.co)

For example:

- http://us-religious-landscape.silk.co/

- http://ethnic-diversity-in-tech.silk.co/

- http://prisons-in-the-us.silk.co/

There are also less datacentric examples such as http://ijnet-journalism-safety.silk.co/ and a gallery at https://www.silk.co/home#gallery 

I think the "journalistic quality" is not currently quite on par with the examples you cited, but the platform potential is definitely there to easily tell these sorts of stories. One thing that's especially nice about silk is that other people can continue to play with and explore the raw data easily.

On Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 3:58:50 PM UTC-7, Chris Amico wrote:

[Tom Meagher]

Hey everybody,

I've had this sitting in my inbox for a few weeks and have been meaning to respond, but keep getting swamped at work. But yes, I'm one of the folks working on "The Next To Die," and I've been a lurker on this list for some time. As I mentioned in the Nieman Lab piece that came out when we launched, both Homicide Watch and Politifact influenced some of our thinking as we were building "The Next To Die": http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/the-marshall-project-teams-up-with-local-news-outlets-to-track-executions-across-america/

I know it's short notice, but I'll be on today's OpenNews community call at 11 a.m. EDT with my colleague Gabriel Dance to talk about "The Next To Die." If anybody wants to join and ask some questions, we'll be happy to discuss it more: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/opennews-calls-Sept30

Thanks,
Tom

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