A Knight News Challenge Application
The Knight News Challenge is an ambitious undertaking to fund innovation in tools that can help digital journalism. I’m planning to submit a proposal around our Datapress data-blogging plugin for WordPress and am seeking some early-adopter WordPress bloggers who’d be interested in experimenting with our tools on their sites.
I believe that publishing rich interactive data visualizations is a powerful way to get your story across. If you’re the New York Times you can build your own Visualization Lab to create these sorts of presentations. But most of us have tighter budgets and less skill. I’m interested in tools that the rest of us—bloggers, not programmers, and with tight budgets—can use to share information.
We’ve created a WordPress plugin called Datapress that lets you WYSIWYG author—not program—interactive visualizations of any data you like. You can drop maps, timelines, tables, charts, lists, thumbnail grids, and graphs into your article the same way you drop in an image. You can include widgets that let your readers sort and filter the data by the criteria you specify. The data you’re presenting can be in a file uploaded to your blog or can live in a google spreadsheet or a wiki where you can maintain it over time—your article will automatically incorporate your changes. All these pieces are incorporated in the standard WordPress blog-post editor.
Datapress uses the Exhibit framework, which has been used to create several hundred interesting data visualizations on the web, including some by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Star Tribune, and the St. Petersburg Times. But with Datapress we’ve tried to make it even easier to author these views and incorporate them in your blogs. A couple of brave bloggers at Factory Portland and Quantnet have already used it successfully for music and finance.
You can see how datapress works on our demo site, watch a tutorial on the datapress blog, or just download the plugin from the wordpress plugins site.
I’m happy to help anyone try the tool, but if you’re a journalist with a wordpress blog I’d particularly love to sign you up as a Guinea pig for our Knight News Challenge application. If we’re funded, you get to be the one dictating the additional features you’ll need to make the tool work for you—and we might even listen!
Hi, what a great project! I’m a financial journalist and blogger working for a Belgian newspaper. My blog platform is Typepad, not WordPress – but I do use WordPress for my personal blog and for newsroom experiments.
I’d love to try this new tool!
Please do dive right in and try it—you can find it on the wordpress plugin site as described above. If you run into any problems or have any questions or feedback, please contact us! We’d love to produce similar extensions (wrapping the underlying exhibit visualization framework) for other platforms like Typepad and Moveable Type, but don’t have the resources (yet). Of course that might change with the challenge.
tried this out a while back would be useful if there a way to center the map rather then just have a world view (and if you are reviving this clean out the mailing list of spam)
I’ll be downloading it and trying it. I am an academic/journalist hybrid, but I’d be happy to participate in your Knight News Challenge application. I teach during the day and am trying to start a volunteer news site (http://www.sgfnews.org) in my “spare” time.
Good luck with your project, and thanks for the plug-in!
Have been playing with the plugin but I seem to get an empty space beneath the title. Will keep fiddling but happy to email.
Hi Paul,
Sorry to hear that it isn’t working on your system.
If you email us at datapress@csail.mit.edu, we’d be happy to help you figure out what’s going awry and fix the problem.
-Ted
Steve –
We’ve fixed that bug in the current release. The map now auto zooms to a proper zoom-level and centering that comfortably boxes in your particular data items.
Thanks for your feedback, and do let us know if there is any way we can support you / add needed features if you’d like to give the tool another try.
Ted
Jonathan -
Great! Let us know how it goes! SGF News is exactly the kind of site we’re interested in running some trials with to find out what features would help improve citizen journalism.
Cool! Forums at FlowingData might be a good place to advertise Datapress:
http://forums.flowingdata.com/
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