Selasa, 03 Juli 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab


Huffington Post puts polling power in the hands of developers with new API

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 03:27 PM PDT

Developers and election watchers take note: The Huffington Post just released a polling data API. The Huffpost Pollster API will allow anyone to dig into more than 13,000 opinion polls on the presidential election as well as U.S. House and Senate races.

The data will allow journalists, developers, and researchers the ability to fetch data from the surveys for their own apps or data-crunching purposes. And the API includes not just results but the full questions and responses, allowing users to dig deep into polling methodology. Andrei Scheinkman, interactive news editor for The Huffington Post, told me the API includes more than 200,000 responses. Instead of just getting raw numbers for X would vote for Mitt Romney and Y would vote for Barack Obama, the API includes responses to questions like, “In general, how satisfied are you with the way things are going in the nation today?”

Here are some of the nerdy basics:

We’re publishing the data as an HTTP-based application programming interface, or API, with JSON and XML responses. For researchers, journalists or anyone who might have trouble using an API, we will soon make the data available through Atom feeds and Excel-ready CSVs.

This is the Huffington Post’s first public API. The data comes from poll aggregator Pollster, which HuffPost acquired in 2010 and has since used to power its political reporting and interactive features. For app creators, the good news is it’s completely open — no strings attached to the data and no penalties for heavy users. The API will be updated as new polls come in during the campaign season. It’s easy to see how the API could lead to dozens of new poll trackers and visualizations that can parse things like geography, party affiliation, and specific campaign issues.

Scheinkman compares the Pollster API to the New York Times congressional API or USA Today’s Census API. All three offer up raw numbers for people to play with, not a database of stories, headlines, or any refined content. “The publishing of the API is an act of journalism,” he told me. “It adds some accessibility and transparency about the world.”

The pollster API could prove to be valuable by sharing the basic-horse race numbers we expect to see in elections, but also providing a deeper understanding of how polls are conducted. If you’re a news organization, that means you get to double down on story possibilities. Scheinkman said the API was designed in part to help demystify the polling process. “I think our main motivation was up till now polling data, while publicly available, was not that accessible,” Scheinkman said.

These are busy times for Arianna Huffington’s media company. There was the Pulitzer win, the debut of the magazine, and, later this summer, a new streaming video network. The API is yet another move to bring the company in line with big names like The New York Times, USA Today, NPR and the Guardian, all of whom provide an API for software makers. “Letting people use the Huffington Post as a platform to build on is something we’re interested in and excited about,” he said.

Correction: This story originally stated NPR’s API was only available to member stations. The full API is available to public.

From wood to newspapers and back again, designers upcycle yesterday’s news

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 10:18 AM PDT

Newspaper wood

Day-old newspapers can line a birdcage or wrap a trout just fine, but a group of Dutch designers is finding a more lasting way to recycle yesterday’s headlines.

“We upcycle,” NewspaperWood co-developer Arjan van Raadshooven told me. “We use something that loses value the next day to temporarily make something else.”

Van Raadshooven and fellow designer/developer Anieke Branderhorst explain that they turn old papers — often unsold misprints still in 50-paper stacks — into logs of wood, which are then used to make desks, jewelry, cabinets, chairs, lamps and anything else they might think up. Prices range from €85 ($107) for a small pendant to €4,520 ($5,694) for a desk. A reading lamp will run you €389 ($490), and a display cabinet is €2,570 ($3,237).

The concept originated with Mieke Meijer, who one day took a roller to some newspapers and glued them together. He added more glue and more papers, spending hours a day on the process, until he ended up with a log. Van Raadshooven and Branderhorst licensed and developed NewspaperWood through their design firm, Vij5. Logs are now produced by machine.

“We do not make square blocks, we make round tree logs,” Van Raadshooven said. “And if we cut it or sandpaper it, you start to see the layers. It’s intersting that sometimes you see letters or a text or words. It’s not that you can completely read it but it shows that there’s a history in the material.”

Van Raadshooven said it takes a few hours to produce each log, and that they are hard as regular wood, only with “some vulnerable points” due to the layering in production.

“If you do not lacquer it, and you sandpaper it, you really feel the paper fiber in the surface,” Van Raadshooven said. “It has a suede feel, which is really nice. It’s a live material just as wood is. If you ever have piece of oak wood it becomes yellow over time. If you have a newspaper and you leave it in the window for a few days, it also becomes a little bit yellow. We do not try to prevent that, we try to use it.”

Designers also make a point of preserving the newspaper aesthetic within the finished products. Necklaces strung with NewspaperWood pendants are framed with brass engraved with the date of publication. As cabinets and desks made of NewspaperWood age, they also warp, sometimes revealing bits of text or ink color previously unseen.

“You can see the origin of the material in some surprising parts,” Branderhorst said. “Sometimes just a little piece pops up, and a really beautiful part becomes visible. Even small mistakes can project a really nice part of the newspaper. It’s not really predicitable.”

Perhaps that’s fitting: Unpredictability also captures the spirit of the industry at this particular moment in its history.

“We are sort of documenting the newspapers that are here now, something that is probably going to disappear,” Branderhorst said. “It’s a nice thing that we sort of laid still this piece in time. It freezes it for a moment.”

Now available for download: Nieman Lab in ebook form

Posted: 01 Jul 2012 11:10 PM PDT

Here at Nieman Lab, we’re always interested in new platforms for our work — both because we like people to read what we produce and because we think it’s important to experiment in some of the same ways that the news organizations we cover do. (Also, we’re very nerdy.)

So I’m happy to say that you now have a new way to learn what we’re learning at the Lab — ebooks.

Now available for (free) download is The Future of News As We Know It (*as of June 2012), a compilation of our best work from June. It’s in EPUB format, which means it’ll work in iBooks on your iPhone or iPad, on Nook, on Sony Reader, or in just about any other ereader other than the Kindle. (UPDATE: There’s now a Kindle version — see below.)

And yes, it’s an R.E.M. pun.

Ebooks are exploding — I spend a ton of time reading them on my iPad — and there are some people for whom a collected, collated package of news, commentary, and analysis is going to be more appealing than remembering to check in to our site every day or following along on Twitter. This is for them.

I pulled this together both because I think there might be an audience for it and because I really wanted to learn about EPUB, which is becoming the lingua franca of ebook publishing. EPUB is mostly extremely unforgiving HTML and CSS, so it wasn’t too difficult a process, but I learned a ton in the process of building WordPress exporters and automating a lot of the backend-code creation. If people are interested, I’d be happy to share the tools and methods I built along the way.

In any event, I’d love to hear from Lab readers about how this looks, what kinds of improvements you’d make, whether you’re interested in an ebook format for our content, and anything else that comes to mind. (I’d also love to hear from anyone reading on a non-Apple platform, since I’ve only tested it extensively on iPad/iPhone.) Get downloading!

[Update, 1:20 p.m.: I've added a version for the Kindle. It's not quite as lovely as the EPUB version — it's missing the custom fonts and some of the images — but it works. Give it a try!]

[Additional update: Here's a sample of what this looks like, in case you don't have iBooks.]

Q: How do I install this ebook in my ereader?

A: For iBooks on your iPad or iPhone, any of these methods will work:

— visit this webpage on your iDevice and tap the download link; it’ll suggest opening it in iBooks,

— emailing the EPUB to yourself and opening that email attachment on your iPad or iPhone, or

— moving the EPUB into your Dropbox folder and then opening it from the Dropbox app on your iDevice.

For other EPUB readers (Nook, Sony Reader, etc.), follow the directions that came with it.

For Kindle, you can load it onto a device by USB or by emailing it to yourself at your Kindle email address.