In 2011, a year when consumers unboxed millions of e-readers, fiction dominated even more of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list. Colleague Carol Memmott and I reported today that 78% of the titles in the weekly book lists last year were fiction, up from 67% in 2007. The finding is one of several covered in our annual look at trends off the book list:

“People are interested in escape,” says Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Report Network, websites for book discussions. “In a number of pages, the story will open, evolve and close, and a lot of what’s going on in the world today is not like that. You’ve got this encapsulated escape that you can enjoy.”

We’ve posted the 100 top-selling titles of 2011 in a handy data table that includes the annual lists back to 2007.

Jan 11, 2012 | Journalism
No Comments »

So, you’re the 67-year-old editor of a small-town newspaper who also happens to do the books for a local businessman.

The local businessman’s not just your boss. He’s also the owner/landlord of your newspaper’s office, your residence, your son’s residence and your daughter’s business. You live in one of those in-grown places that dot America, a place where everyone whispers everyone’s business.

One day, you’re arrested. The charge: embezzling $9,000 from this businessman-boss-landlord.

The arrest happens in the middle of the day. Somehow, the local police chief decides to give you a perp walk in handcuffs down a main street of your little town, where everyone knows you and you know everyone. And, somehow, a freelance photographer just happens to be there, takes photos of you perp-walking, and sells them to a rival weekly newspaper, which of course publishes them.

You, the newspaper editor, say it’s all a mistake. Of course she didn’t steal anything … it was an accident!

The town’s in an uproar. Scandal! And on top of it a perp walk right in town for a 67-year-old lady!
(more…)

Nov 26, 2011 | Journalism
No Comments »

The USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list has a new look and added interactivity, part of a relaunch of books coverage. It’s been a fun project that has been on my front burner for about three months.

I get to work with all kinds of data at USA TODAY, but the book list has been a constant. When I arrived at USAT in 1997, one of the first projects I took on was to build and analyze an archive of the list to mark its fifth anniversary. Since then, as that archive grew to hold nearly 18 years of data, we’ve used it to anchor stories about authors and trends in publishing. We’re awfully proud of the list, and people in the publishing industry tell us it’s one of the most accurate accounts of Americans’ weekly reading habits.

Last year, we opened the archives up to developers via a Best-Selling Books API. This year, giving the list itself a facelift was the next logical step.

We were fortunate to assemble a crack team of designers, developers and product managers who, in a short time, conceptualized, designed, redesigned, and coded an entirely new collection of book-related pages for our site. What’s new:
(more…)

Jul 1, 2011 | Analysis, Journalism
No Comments »

Do pricing trends in music and books have any resonance for news and, in particular, investigative journalists?

When Amazon.com recently made a new album by Explosions in the Sky available for $2.99 for 24 hours, it caught my attention.

Until then, I hadn’t bought any of the band’s albums. I’d been mildly interested in EitS since it played an episode of Austin City Limits, but given my limited music-purchase budget, I hadn’t prioritized one of its albums over buying new releases by my favorite artists.

But $2.99 made it too easy. I clicked “buy.”

Later, I thought about the psychology of the buy. Why did $2.99 win me when $4.99 or $5.99 might not have? As I type, the price is back up to $7.99 for a download. Had I stumbled on that title today at that price, I would have passed.

But $2.99 hooked me. Why?
(more…)

Jun 12, 2011 | Journalism, Music
No Comments »

After two months of processing Census data and writing about it here, I’m ready for a nice break. But before I go off to explore other topics, I thought I’d wrap this episode of Census 2010 with a look at how my teammates and I processed the data. My deepest thanks to my colleagues for doing such a great job. And many thanks to the journalists across the U.S. who offered encouragement as we shared our work with the journalism community.

*   *   *   *

On a Thursday afternoon in the first week of February, three of us from our newsroom’s database team gathered at my computer and tried our best to subdue the butterflies swarming in our stomachs. What we were about to do, we hoped, would not only help us cover the year’s biggest demographic story but also help journalists across the country do the same.

That’s because weeks earlier, somewhere in the midst of poring through Census technical manuals and writing a few thousand lines of SAS code, we’d had a bright idea:

Let’s share this.

Really?
(more…)

Apr 2, 2011 | Census, Journalism
No Comments »

I had the privilege this week of speaking on two panels at the 2011 Investigative Reporters and Editors Computer-Assisted Reporting* conference in Raleigh, N.C. Here are the slides my co-presenters and I put together:

– “Free Software: From Spreadsheets to GIS” with Jacob Fenton of the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Here is part 1, and here’s part 2.

– “APIs: Making the Web a Data Medium” with Derek Willis of The New York Times.

* Those of us with a few miles on the tires remember that the conference used to go by the name NICAR — for National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. People still call it that.

Feb 26, 2011 | Journalism, News technology
No Comments »

The web-o-sphere this week brought forth a collection of opinions on the value of data journalism and the skills that go with it. To wit:

• Tim Berners-Lee, he who invented the World Wide Web, told the Guardian that “journalists need to be data-savvy” and that “data-driven journalism is the future.” The story then goes on to question whether data analysis could ever replace traditional reporting.
• The blog 10,000 Words declared that one of the “5 Myths about digital journalism” is that “journalists must have database development skills” and suggested that most journalists should leave high-level hacking to the experts.
• Another site, FleetStreetBlues, opined that “amidst all this hype, earnestness and spreadsheet-geekery, here’s the truth about so-called ‘data journalism’. It’s still about the story, stupid.”

There’s been a bunch of reaction to these posts, including a few people pointing out a 1986 Time story that sounds similar to the one this week from the Guardian. And therein lies the problem with all three pieces: None of them benefits from a big-picture, historical perspective on data journalism — not where it came from, not how it’s changed and especially not the massive amount of ground the label covers these days.

We used to call it CAR

Back  when software came on 5.25-inch floppy disks, or maybe before then, the idea of using a PC to “crunch numbers” was christened “computer-assisted reporting.” These days, we call it data journalism because, along the way, it became obvious the old name was anachronistic. As Phil Meyer once said, we don’t talk about telephone-assisted reporting, do we?

When I got into the game — when Paradox was the desktop database manager of choice — our newsroom had a personal computer designated as the “CAR station.” While others worked on dumb terminals connected to a mainframe, I was surfing the web with Netscape and ringing up Paul Overberg for advice on Census data. I was the newsroom data expert — the guy reporters called when they had a spreadsheet on a disk or an idea to get data from city hall.

In that era — with database-driven web startups like Amazon.com spreading cultural revolution — it was easy to foresee a time when reporters wouldn’t just get the occasional spreadsheet but find themselves inundated with data. Thus was born (at least in my sphere) the drive to evangelize CAR in the newsroom. We taught Excel, we sent people to IRE boot camps, we set up presentations showing the kinds of stories journalists were landing with these skills. The message of CAR was about finding stories and using simple tools to do it: spreadsheets, databases, maps, stats.

Now we call it hacking

Soon enough, though, the craft began to change and so did the talk at IRE CAR conferences — especially in the hands-on classes and demos. In Philadelphia in 2002, the hands-on classes mostly covered Access, Excel, SPSS and, for the adventurous, SQL Server. Just a few years later, in Cleveland and Houston, the offerings included sessions on web scraping, Perl, Python, MySQL and Django.
(more…)

Nov 26, 2010 | Journalism
17 Comments »

With journalism in the midst of a reinvention, there’s no shortage of opinions as to which content or practitioners will carry the flag forward. We’ve read enough about whether data is journalism, and we can fill a book with opinions on bloggers and whether what they do is journalism or not.

But here’s another question: Regardless of what you’re doing — writing, coding, designing — is it worthy of being called art?

On a recent trip to New York, we stopped in Mountainville to tour the Storm King Art Center. It’s a 500-acre sculpture museum with works by Maya Lin, Andy Goldsworthy and others who take simple elements and arrange them in fresh, surprising ways. We toured the fields, and we saw stone, glass, metal and earth all crafted into surprising shapes. The place is massive and so are the works. For example (click for full size):

Beethoven’s Quartet (front) and Pyramidian by Mark di Suvero:

Frogs Legs, also by di Suvero:

Storm King Wall by Andy Goldsworthy, snaking through a stand of trees:
(more…)

Jul 3, 2010 | Journalism
1 Comment »

Concise, clear writing is one of the journalist’s best assets. No matter which platform you’re feeding — print, web, mobile or a technology to be named later — good writing separates the amateurs from the pros.

Here are seven ways to improve your word skills. And if these whet your appetite for more, try Roy Peter Clark’s excellent Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer or William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s classic The Elements of Style. Also helpful are the sections on writing mechanics and grammar from the Purdue Online Writing Lab.

1. Put commas in their place.

You can solve half of the world’s comma problems by remembering this rule:

Add a comma between two independent clauses linked by a coordinating conjunction — and, or, nor, but, yet, for. An independent clause has a subject and a verb. Don’t throw a comma before a coordinating conjunction unless what follows is an independent clause.

Right:
The thief stole a television and a laptop, but he left behind a bag with $1,000.

Wrong:
The thief stole a television and laptop, but left behind a bag with $1,000.

2. Conquer its/it’s confusion.

Not knowing the difference between its and it’s says “amateur” the way Chuck E. Cheese says “stimulation overload.”

For the record:

Its = possessive; “belongs to it”
It’s = “it is”

Right:
The team lost its game by one goal.

Right:
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

3. Keep sentences short.

You’re not writing the great American novel. You’re conveying information to readers. Stick to one or two thoughts per sentence. If you have more than two commas in a sentence, try to split it.

Cringe-worthy:
The Burkett County legislature voted Monday to add six new police officers to the county force, adding staff at a time when the county budget is already 5 percent ahead of last year's spending, a level that some activists say will add to a deficit, which at $250 million is already on pace to bankrupt the county by 2012.

Better:
The Burkett County legislature voted Monday to add six new police officers to the county force. The move adds staff while the county budget is already 5 percent ahead of last year's. The level, some activists say, will add to a $250 million deficit that's already on pace to bankrupt the county by 2012.

4. Be active.

Active-verb construction — sentences in subject-verb-object order — carries more punch. Although it’s not imperative to write every sentence that way, avoiding passive sentence construction adds punch to your prose.

Limp:
The mayor was struck by the protester's sign.

Stronger:
A protester's sign hit the mayor.

Notice, also, the substitution of “hit” for “struck.” “Struck” is a word often found in police press releases; others are “perpetrator,” “brandished” and “apprehended.” You don’t use those in conversation. You say “man,” “waved” and “caught.” Write the way you speak — you’ll sound less phony.
(more…)

Jun 13, 2010 | Journalism, Writing
1 Comment »

Last week’s launch of The Bay Citizen, a San Francisco journalism non-profit that will, among other things, feed The New York Times’ Bay Area report, adds one more piece to a journalism mosaic that’s increasingly experimental, entrepreneurial and, dare I say, hopeful.

It’s pretty amazing, really, to see what’s emerged over the last several years. It’s the antithesis of journalism pre-1995.

Back then, news reporting mostly came in five basic flavors: newspaper, radio, TV, magazine, book. Now, enabled by technology, forced by the economy and in recognition of core declines, journalism’s finding a way forward in smaller, independent ways:

• Non-profits spinning up to handle investigative or regional journalism. ProPublica, with its recent Pulitzer, is one of the most prominent. But there’s also California Watch (from the Center for Investigative Reporting), Voice of San Diego, The Texas Tribune, Texas Watchdog and many others.
• Educators breathing life into investigative journalism, such as those at American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop.
• For-profit, web-only journalism startups. Washington, D.C., has the soon-to-launch TBD.com from Allbritton Communications. The Faster Times bills itself as “a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.”
• Data, maps and stories targeted to the block where you live (Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock).
• “Community-powered reporting,” where the public suggests and funds stories (Spot.us).
• Hundreds or thousands of bloggers and citizen journalists who are writing about their town or street — and organizations that  aggregate or network them.

I call it a hopeful sign, even if some of it’s not brand new. While legacy journalism battles to refashion itself, and lays off thousands of skilled journalists in the process, from the wreckage emerges a hint of a rebirth.

Particularly encouraging: They often focus on investigative journalism or local coverage that’s been the victim of cuts at legacy institutions, and they’re making smart use of data and analytic journalism.

Whether these efforts thrive or fizzle will, I believe, be determined largely by the quality of the content they produce. But their emergence is good news, whether you’re a journalist fresh out of college or one who needs to reinvent yourself 20 years into a career. Or a reader.

Update, June 1, 2010: Check out this list of promising local news sites from Michele McLellan. There’s even more to this mosaic than you might realize.

May 31, 2010 | Journalism
1 Comment »