October 17th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, Journalism, Presentations
If you happened to be at the recent Online News Association conference in Boston and happened to attend the session on covering the 2012 elections, then a good bit of this will be repetitive. Since there wasn’t a ton of time to expand on what I said, and I don’t want to leave the impression [...]
August 10th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Car Tools, Journalism, Work
My first job in Web development was as a member of washingtonpost.com’s “Tools Team.” I was, in title if not in practice, a Tool. Done snickering? Let’s move on. The Tools Team built mostly internal applications and services that helped the Web site run better. I mainly got to work on front-facing projects like the [...]
May 1st, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, IRE, Journalism
To my mother’s regret, I was never the literature lover she is. And I am not remotely the writer I might have been expected to be, given that my parents both taught English, one at the high school level and the other at college. I also am not the most graceful of interviewers, as my [...]
March 6th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, Journalism
Anthony DeBarros of USA Today and I talked about APIs at this year’s CAR conference in Raleigh. We got a lot of “Web people”, to use a lame expression, in the audience. If you’re a reporter who works with data, why should you care? The simple answer is that APIs are an extension of what [...]
January 23rd, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Journalism
Two pieces that ran in The Times in the past week caught my eye because they represented, in different ways, two responses to a problem that we all face but which is particularly meaningful for journalism: information overload. The first article, a not-unfamiliar tale of D.C. overachievement, describes how 20-somethings working for politically-minded organizations arise [...]