So you love huge research-intensive reporting projects — but finding a useful and user-friendly way to examine and present all that information is a nightmare!
Help is on the way, from the New York Times.
Last weekend, Brian Boyer, a programmer and journalism grad student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, reported an interesting announcement he heard at the Online News Association conference. It’s about the innovative interactive viewer that NYTimes.com built to both help reporters analyze thousands of pages of documents containing Hillary Clinton’s White House schedules, and to publish an edited selection of significant pages.
Responding in this comment to Boyer’s post, the NYT‘s Aron Pilhofer elaborated: “We’re going to release the source code as a standalone [open source] Rails application. We’re also going to release it …on EC2 [Amazon.com’s “cloud computing” service]. So, users who want to use it but don’t want to have to go through the pain of deploying the application can just spin up an instance of the public AMI [Amazon machine image] and start using it right away. That’s the plan right now, anyway. This is still very much a work in progress.”
Timing? Pilhofer says this tool should be available “sometime after the election.”
What could your news org do with a tool like that?
