Tag Archives: journalism

Pultizer Prize at ProPublica

By Dan Nguyen | Published: April 13, 2010
It’s been a huge last few days for ProPublica. My colleagues Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein unveiled the result of 7+ months of reporting, a much anticipated collaboration with “This American Life” on how the hedge fund Magnetar Capital helped prolong the housing bubble by betting against risky investments that it advocated for. Also, our [...]
Posted in thoughts | Also tagged , | 1 Comment

Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series

By Dan Nguyen | Published: April 6, 2010
So a little while ago, I set out to write some tutorials that would guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites. A “little while” turned out to be more than a month-and-a-half. I actually wrote most of it in a [...]
Posted in works | Also tagged , , , , , | 18 Comments

Coding for Journalists 104: Pfizer’s Doctor Payments; Making a Better List

By Dan Nguyen | Published: April 6, 2010
Update (4/28): Replaced the code and result files. Still haven’t written out a thorough explainer of what’s going on here. Update (4/19): After revisiting this script, I see that it fails to capture some of the payments to doctors associated with entities. I’m going to rework this script and post and update soon. So the [...]
Posted in works | Also tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Coding for Journalists 103: Who’s been in jail before: Cross-checking the jail log with the court system; Use Ruby’s mechanize to fill out a form

By Dan Nguyen | Published: April 6, 2010
This is part of a four-part series on web-scraping for journalists. As of Apr. 5, 2010, it was a published a bit incomplete because I wanted to post a timely solution to the recent Pfizer doctor payments list release, but the code at the bottom of each tutorial should execute properly. The code examples are [...]
Posted in works | Also tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Coding for Journalists 101: Go from knowing nothing to scraping Web pages. In an hour. Hopefully.

By Dan Nguyen | Published: April 6, 2010
Someone asked in this online chat for journalists: I want to program/code, but where does a non-programmer journalist begin? My colleague Jeff Larson gave what I believe is the most practical and professionally-useful answer: web-scraping (jump to my summary of web-scraping here, or read this more authorative source). This is my attempt to walk someone [...]
Posted in works | Also tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Day of the Tiger: How Newspapers, Networks, and News Aggregators Played Tiger Woods on Friday

By Dan Nguyen | Published: February 20, 2010
On Friday, golfer Tiger Woods held a TV appearance to talk about life after marital problems. At around 2:30 p.m., I screen capped some of the websites for some of the largest news organizations and aggregators. Today, I looked at the screen-caps, cropped them to the top 1600 pixels, and marked in green the areas of the pages devoted to Woods coverage (or related coverage, such as "Slideshow: Top 10 Adultery Confessions). Even three hours after what was generally considered a highly-scripted 10 minutes of non-revelations (the Golf Writers Association of America boycotted it), Woods pretty much dominated the most visible spaces on general news websites. Of the major American news organizations, CNN probably had the most real estate devoted to Tiger; New York Times, the least. Both Drudge Report and Huffington Post had Woods as the lede. Asian publications (the few that I could read) gave little space. Among social/computerized news aggregators, Google News gave Woods front placement...unsurprising considering its algorithm is driven by what news organizations have. Neither Reddit and Digg had any mention of it in their news sub-sections. This may be a little unfair, as these sites' users may be me more strict in keeping all sports-related news strictly in their sports subsections. But I did check their frontpages (which are the top stories from all the major sections) and Tiger didn't make an appearance.
Posted in works | Also tagged , | Leave a comment

200 Jobs rated for 2010, by CareerCast.com. Actuary #1, Software Engineer #2, Philosopher #11, Newspaper Reporter #184

By Dan Nguyen | Published: January 5, 2010
CareerCast.com released a list of 200 jobs ranked by such factors as stress level, pay, work environment, and hiring outlook. Read their methodology here. The WSJ made it into a sortable multipage list but I took the liberty of making a single-page version with bar graphs showing the starting, mid, and top salaries. At first glance...seems like it's great to be a geek, with the top 6 jobs steeped in the mathematics and science (exception being historian...which is a geekiness of its own sort). But going down the list...say, all the way to position #11, and your BS meter should be going off. Apparently, philosopher is the 11th best job, with very low physical demands and stress, a "very good" hiring outlook, and a median income of $60,000. Really? A comment on this physicsforums thread sums up my a priori assumption: "I have no factual information but I guess your career choices would be either getting a faculty position at some university or flipping burgers."
Posted in thoughts | Also tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Revisiting the New Orleans Police Shootings

By Dan Nguyen | Published: December 14, 2009
ProPublica, with Frontline and the Times-Picayune, just started publishing a multi-part series examining unsolved shootings linked to the New Orleans police. One of the sparks for re-opening a painful chapter in the Katrina saga was this photo, captured by freelancer Marko Georgiev.
Posted in thoughts | Also tagged , , | Leave a comment

Bad Nurses, and Our Tragic Inability to Track Them

By Dan Nguyen | Published: December 7, 2009
On Sunday, my ProPublica colleagues Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times, put out a story examining the lack of standards in the temp nursing agency, a dangerous situation considering California’s desperate shortage of nursing staff. Emboldened by a chronic nursing shortage and scant regulation, the firms vie for their [...]
Posted in works | Also tagged , , , , | Leave a comment