December 10th, 2008 | by Derek | published in Journalism, SLA
Update: The Miami Herald’s obituary for Liz. Liz Donovan, one of the best news researchers ever, died of lung cancer in Gainesville, Ga. Truly a pioneer among news librarians, she was instrumental in everything from research for Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate to embracing (and leading other researchers to adopt) the use of blogs, wikis [...]
September 23rd, 2008 | by Derek | published in Journalism
Ok, I love the fact that CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller keeps such good tabs on presidential travel, but can somebody please come up with a backup plan in case, heaven forbid, Knoller gets hit by a bus or something? Is this too much to ask of WH reporters? This is the kind of thing where [...]
September 21st, 2008 | by Derek | published in Journalism
One of the things I try to stress to students in my computer-assisted reporting class at GW each spring is the difference between a story based largely on anecdotes or temporal observation and the same story with the addition of a definitive analysis of data. The LIRR story in today’s Times by Walt Bogdanich, Andy [...]
August 18th, 2008 | by Derek | published in Journalism
Be sure to catch Caspio’s David Milliron’s responses at Mindy’s site. Mindy asks for some bullet points on why news organizations would do better to not use Caspio for their Web database needs. Feel free to add on: SEO. If you like building databases that are not indexed by Google and other search engines, then [...]
July 22nd, 2008 | by Derek | published in Journalism
My friend Dave Gulliver had a fascinating piece in his paper on Sunday about the birth of quadruplets in a Sarasota hospital. It’s a great story, but what makes it greater is that it was written by somebody with a certain amount of expertise on the subject of difficult premature multiple births. I hope Dave [...]