“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.

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!

A year later, you go to trial. Your defense attorney offers up a case full of evidence against the accuser, calling him “obsessed and unhinged.”

A jury acquits you of all charges.

What happens next? Well, you’re a newspaper editor in a small town.

Your paper places a big headline — INNOCENT — atop a 4,700-word cover story, with every bit of detail of the trial’s proceedings and testimony.

And writes an editorial, too.

This part, a bit of a dig at the “other newspaper,” caught my eye:

Under cross-examination, [businessman-landlord Jack] Goehring admitted that he too was nearby during the arrest, and after the event had accompanied [freelance photographer Maud] Krulla to Middleburg Life to sell her pictures.

Both Middleburg Life (and Middleburg Life’s sister publication, Leesburg Today) declined the offer.

Asked if he had finally sold the pictures for $200, Goehring insisted that he had not.

Shown a receipt from the Loudoun Times Mirror for $200 in payment for Krulla’s pictures, Goehring denied having accompanied her to Leesburg to sell them.

Asked if his purpose was not to humiliate [Dee Dee] Hubbard, Goehring replied that he did it because he thought the public had “a right to know.”

The Loudoun Times Mirror had earlier refused, on ethical grounds, to identify Krulla as the source of the photographs they spread across the front page of their paper the day after Hubbard’s arrest.

At press time, no comment on the paper’s decision to pay Krulla, print her pictures with a Times Mirror photo attribution, and post them on YouTube with links from the paper’s website has been forthcoming.

Who said small-town news couldn’t be fascinating?

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:

– The list itself has an all-new design, including book covers.
– You can filter the list by genre or type. Handy if you enjoy a certain kind of book.
– Dig into the archives. Search by title, author or in the book’s brief description. You also can see entire lists from earlier weeks. Here, for example, is the first book list USA TODAY published, on Oct. 28, 1993.
– Clicking a book title takes you to its own page, which includes stats, reviews from Goodreads and latest Tweets about the title (more reader reviews to come). Here’s the page for To Kill a Mockingbird, which has been on the list for 755 weeks so far.
– Links to buy the title from some of readers’ favorite sources. And since our developers optimized the site for tablets and phones, you can find, buy and read a book quickly.

All this is part of an overall redesign of books coverage, which in turn is part of a larger site redesign.

My role in all this was to help the team understand the intricacies and particulars of the list and suggest the most suitable interactions it could offer. Coding-wise, I wrote some SQL to support the fetching and searching of the lists and the individual title’s archive data.

What a great time, a nice next chapter after finishing our work on the Census 2010 P.L. 94 release. More to come …

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?

Here’s what I came up with: That was a price I was willing to risk on an artist who, to me, was an unknown quantity.

I’m one of those consumers who doesn’t like to take risks, especially with the very subjective love-it-or-loathe-it world of music. I read reviews, I check sound clips and I watch videos on YouTube. But still I feel uneasy dropping $10 or $15 on music I’m not sure I’ll like. But $2.99? I’ll risk it and not feel horrible if the album’s a dud.

Yes, I’m picky — and tightfisted. But it comes from history. I remember vinyl and browsing stacks of 12-inch LPs in record stores. They were shrink-wrapped, and I couldn’t hear the music without buying it. All I had was the album cover, song titles and liner notes. More than once, after spending the equivalent of $14 to $18 in today’s dollars on an album, I didn’t like it once I put it on the turntable. Ouch. To this day, I want to be convinced that I’ll like an artist before I invest $15 on an album.

But at $2.99, the risk of pain is low.

Understanding this about my own consumer behavior helped me realize that, for me, the likelihood of value must be higher than the risk of pain.

Low risk equals easier buying decisions, and that can equal profits. USA TODAY’s Carol Memmott recently wrote about the growing number of authors who are self-publishing e-books and doing a brisk business selling them for 99 cents to $2.99.

Valuing the news — minimizing risk

Aside from paywall efforts and subscription models, the news industry currently gives away most everything for free. But is there something to be learned from what’s happening in music and books? Is there journalism that offers a perceived value at a price worth risking?

Some of this is happening:

The non-profit ProPublica has been selling stories as Kindle Singles for 99 cents each, including The Wall Street Money Machine and Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks: The Untold Story. Reader reviews are positive, and both stories place high on Amazon’s niche best-seller rankings.

ProPublica describes the pieces as “longer than almost all magazine articles, but shorter than traditional books,” which immediately pegs them as narrative pieces not too far afield from the novels and nonfiction that e-book device owners are increasingly snapping up.

The New York Times published its Wikileaks coverage as an e-book, Open Secrets.

Interestingly enough, among the reader comments for those e-books are several observations that much of the material is available already for free. What if it weren’t? Would people buy?

*   *   *   *

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?

Yes.

Let’s share the data we’re downloading, parsing and packaging up for ourselves. Let’s give it to Investigative Reporters and Editors to give to its members — our colleagues in the broader world of data journalism. Why? Because we knew all too well — having lived through one or more decennial Census reports — just how complex, painful and time consuming it could be to do a good job with the data. We could help. We’d consider this a goodwill gesture from our newsroom and a blessing for every journalist who’s been dreading having to deal with the Census on deadline. Our editors said yes.

So, there we were on a February afternoon: Me, Paul Overberg (who’s driven our Census coverage for years), and Barbara Hansen, our data team colleague who’s also a frequent collaborator on Census analysis. Four states were coming — Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia and New Jersey. We had reporters, editors and graphic artists in our newsroom waiting. We had colleagues in all four states waiting.

I opened FileZilla and pulled the New Jersey file, unzipped it and fired up SAS.

“Ready?” I said.

Click.

Fast-forward to about two hours later — we had spreadsheets, we had maps, we had an interactive. And we had files up on IRE’s site and distributed to reporters in all four states. By the second day of releases, we were averaging about 20 minutes to process a state’s files and distribute them to each end point.

Two months later, feeling spent but happy, we’d ground through 50 states and D.C. and heard from enough people to believe we’d done some good.

In the process of preparing and executing our plan, we learned a whole lot about crafting a strategy for handling a complex data release. Here’s a little about how we did it and lessons I took away.

The factory

What we affectionately called our “Census Factory” was a series of applications and scripts. From end to end:

FileZilla: Free, open-source FTP client to download the zipped text files posted by the Census Bureau. (You can’t do anything till you download the files!)

SAS: Business analytics software to script the import, slicing and export of the data to CSV, Excel and Access formats. It’s pricy, but we are fortunate to have a license. The advantages of SAS are several: It’s very, very fast; you can embed SQL in your scripts; it has a function that easily merged the three text files Census provided; and it handily exports to multiple formats with little effort.

The SAS scripts produced the CSV and Excel files we shared with journalists. They also provided the output for the next steps needed for our coverage:

ArcView: Mapping software by ESRI that we used to generate shapefiles for print maps and the interactive Flash map our colleague Juan Thomassie built. Paul also used it to build a set of 2000 tract-level data that was comparable to the new 2010 tract boundaries. To load maps in ArcView on deadline, we used a SAS script to export a table to Microsoft Access, and Paul’s prebuilt maps pulled data from there.

SQL Server: We built a fully normalized data warehouse to store our processed data and to serve our Flash graphic and data tables via an API. Again, we used a SAS script to output, this time to Excel. For some reason, I’ve had better success importing that into SQL Server than plain text files so I went with it.

The tools we used we chose for a few reasons — among them availability, organizational integration, and familiarity. For example, we’d used SAS for the 2000 Census and saved our scripts — and we simply modified them for the 2010 data. Nevertheless, everything could have been done (and was done by others) with open source options such as Python for data parsing, QGIS for mapping, and various web frameworks (Django/Rails) for interactivity. I tend to avoid software holy wars. If you like it, use it.

What we learned

We moved a lot of data, and we moved it quickly. Here’s what helped us:

Diagramming the process: Early on, we sketched out a logical data flow. Who were our “customers,” and what would each need out of the hundreds of pieces of data available? I drew up a flow chart; it helped to visualize which parts of the process would have prior dependencies, and it helped us divide up tasks for preparing code and for each day’s processing.

Reading the documentation: The Census technical manuals were invaluable. Writing queries to join tables or select geographies was only possible by understanding the intricacies of the data, and that’s where we found the answers. Many of the struggles I saw journalists face during this round of the Census had their roots in skipping this step.

Writing documentation: Because we were sharing data outside our newsroom, we needed to document the output files’ fields. This helped us produce better files — it forced us to organize the output in a logical manner and weed out fields that were unneeded by most journalists.

Scripting tasks: Wherever possible, we wrote code to replace manual tasks, from dropping files in certain folders to updating server tables. In retrospect, I see several places in the data flow where I could have automated more and saved myself some keystrokes. Next time …

Getting feedback early and often: As soon as we had output files ready, we sent copies to some database editor friends and Census veterans. They gave valuable feedback on the content, and we wound up adding fields at their request. Once the releases began, we listened carefully to the journalists using our work. Occasionally, they identified gaffes in our documentation or, in one case, an issue with a state’s tract file. One colleague helped us identify a problem with our data import about an hour before the first state dropped. Having your work fact-checked by the brightest in the business is a huge benefit to sharing data.

Enlisting fresh eyes: After spending two months coding scripts and creating the factory, Paul and I asked our colleague Barbara Hansen to be a fresh set of eyes on our work. She ran our scripts from end to end, double-checked every calculation and file, and generally helped us avoid looking foolish. It was a huge help.

Even with all the prep, my palms were a tad moist that first day of processing in February. They became even more moist when I discovered mid-stream that one of my table joins needed an extra qualifier to work right. But all the prep even made that easy to fix. We all heaved a sigh of relief when the data streamed onto our web site.

– “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.

• 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.

The growth of the web and the availability of data helped push the change. I also suspect that “CAR specialists” who started down the data journalism road in the 1990s had pretty much exhausted the boundaries of Access and Excel and were, as we should have been, on to new things. Either way, by the time PolitiFact won a Pulitzer, the era of news apps was in full bloom and the concept of programmer-journalist was simply the next natural evolution of data journalism. Hello, Hacks/Hackers.

But the message in the CAR (now data journalism) community remained the same: We use these tools to find and tell stories. We use them like we use a telephone. The story is still the thing.

On the outside looking in

Back to the week’s three disparate-yet-related stories, one of which really raised the ire of the aforementioned Pulitzer winner. Each one misses the point because it’s missing that context:

• Once a pioneer, Sir Berners-Lee is late to the party in declaring data journalism “the future.” That future has passed. The ability to handle data is no longer a skill journalists ought to learn — it’s a basic life skill my kids are learning in middle school. Plus, I cannot think of an instance in the last 15 years where someone in the CAR community suggested that data journalism was a replacement for shoe-leather reporting. That the writer raises the issue tells me he’s reacting to the hype of Berners-Lee’s statement, not assessing the reality of what’s practiced.
• The CAR/data journalism community’s always been heavily geared toward helping people build these skills. The entry-level boot camps at each year’s IRE CAR conference walk people through Excel and Access — great places to start. But I don’t tell people there’s a limit on what they can do. In the same way that the craft as a whole has evolved, journalists who start down this road usually move on to more complex skills. The only limits on people are the ones they place on themselves. Indeed, the only myth that needs busting here is the one that says you have to be Einstein to learn this stuff or have some magical left brain/right brain balance. No, you just have to be persistent.
• “It’s still about the story.” It’s never not been. The panel descriptions for the last 10 years’ worth of IRE CAR conferences speak for themselves.

If anything, this collection of stories should remind us that more than ever, we need organizations such as IRE, Hacks/Hackers and others to not only impart skills but provide the context for why they’re so desperately important.

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:

If art is “the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions,” the works at Storm King more than qualify. As we happened upon the pieces, each prompted a reaction. It wasn’t just the pieces themselves but the way Storm King’s curators had them arrayed around the site’s expansive hills and fields.

In the old days, in the newsroom, we used to talk about stories or pages that evoked a reaction. We called them “Hey, Martha!” stories. As in, “Hey, Martha! You have to read this!” Something about the craft or the news or the combination hit the senses.

There’s still no shortage of news. But combined with craft? In the context of faster, nimbler, smaller and less expensive, some of the craft that got many of us into this business — working with words or images in an artistic way — seems harder to find. But when a piece of journalism actually is artfully done, it jumps out from the mass of the day’s information.

Consider the lead on a Pulitzer-winning story by Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post about parents who unintentionally kill their children:

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

Every word of that story grabbed me — not only because I knew of the case but because Weingarten told it masterfully. As a parent, I could feel this family’s pain and horror deep in my own gut.

Recently, I wrote that unique content is a journalism organization’s most valuable currency and that quality builds uniqueness. Arguing over whether a blog is journalism or not misses the point. We need instead to pursue quality. So, if you participate in the act of creation as a journalist — as a writer, reporter, editor, coder, photographer, designer, videographer, audio producer — ask yourself this about your work:

• Is it thoughtfully arranged?
• Does it display mastery of the form?
• Does it appeal to the senses?
• Does it communicate well?
• Will it evoke a response?

In other words, is it art? Those questions aren’t limited to paintings in a museum or metal structures in a field.

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.


5. Cut unnecessary words.

Remember eighth grade and that 500-word essay assignment? Remember how you padded your sentences to hit the goal? You can stop doing that now. Brevity makes for better prose. Remove redundant phrases and extra words.

Padded:
In order to improve the police station's lighting, the town hired a building contractor to install overhead skylights.

Tight:
To improve the police station's lighting, the town hired a contractor to install skylights.

6. Save your best words for last.

I’m a big fan of the 2-3-1 rule. In a sentence, the words with the most impact are last. Second in impact are the words at the front. Least are those in the middle. People tend to remember the last words most, so make sure what you say there counts.

Notice how rearranging these sentences adds to or subtracts from the impact (no pun intended):

Strong last words:
At 2:32 p.m., Johnson veered off the road and hit a 10-foot brick wall.

Weak last words:
Johnson veered off the road and hit a 10-foot brick wall at 2:32 p.m.


7. Write, rewrite, then rewrite again

All text benefits from revision. The best writers know this. They go back, erase, examine, cut, rearrange and craft sentences and paragraphs until they sing. You can do the same.

Have some tips of your own? Share them below.

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.