nwkarchivist:

“Three Cars For The price Of One”  Guess the Year…

Newsweek, 19??

Can you guess the year?

nwkarchivist:

Please consider giving The Daily Beast a vote for a prestigious Data Journalism Award from the Global Editors Network and Google.  Thanks.

Yes, please vote for our tool that tracks mentions of guns and gun control from Congress members on Twitter. We’ll love you forever.

We just got word that John Avlon, who has been writing with The Beast since 2008, was promoted to political director. Many congratulations to John!

Here’s the email from Tina: 

To: All Staff

From: Tina Brown 

I am very pleased to share the news that John Avlon has been promoted to Political Director for Newsweek & The Daily Beast.

John has been with The Beast since 2008 as senior columnist, juggling his online and video commentary for us with his role as a CNN contributor and finding time to write 3 books - Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America (published by us - and endorsed by President Clinton), and co-authoring two volumes of “Deadline Artists”. He was Rudy Giuliani’s chief speechwriter while he served as mayor and is also the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics. John won the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ award for best online column in 2012 - he will continue to write his column in his new role.

Says John, ‘over the past four years, I’ve enjoyed working with Tina and the talented writers at The Daily Beast and Newsweek spanning the spectrum of left, right and center. I’m looking forward to building on our reputation for excellence and edge in this new role, working with what I believe is the best team in the business.’

Please join me in congratulating John on this promotion!

Tina

Ready to hear something really, really, reeeealllly exciting?

NWKTUMBLR IS NOMINATED FOR A WEBBY! WOOHOO! 

Yes, for real, how cool is that?! nwktumblr was part of the package NewsBeast submitted for the “Social:  News & Information” category and we got word this morning that we were finalists for an award. The Webbys are pretty much like the Oscars for Internet dorks so that’s a pretty big deal for us!

But we’re up against some pretty stiff competition: CNN, NBC, The New York Times, and…The New York Times. 

So please, if you like nwktumblr hanging out in your dashboard and want to give us any love whatsoever please take a moment and visit the Webby’s website to vote for our entry.

It looks like this: 

Yes, that’s a little confusing because the screenshot is our sister tumblr at Cheat Sheet and it says “The Daily Beast Social” but we promise that little black arrow links right back here to nwktumblr. 

So anyways, thanks a million for following us and liking/reblogging our stuff and know that we think you guys are very topnotch.

All-digital was the right move. Or as Romenesko frames it, “no regrets.” 

“I tried to put a bunch of photos and updates on there, plus some tweets and jiffs or whatever. I don’t know. Looks like a liveblog to me.”

newsbeastlabs:

After the Newtown shooting in December, we had a meeting over the phone to discuss our coverage. We decided to have a two speed approach: a quick reader-driven story about why they do or don’t own guns (which we’ve written about a bit on this blog), and a deeper-dive look at the anticipated legislative issue that this and other recent shootings seemed to be bringing about, which we launched Monday as www.ThisIsYourRepOnGuns.com. The project idea grew out of the simple problem that not many people can name their representatives off the top of their head, let alone know their exact stance on gun control or how to get in touch to make their voice heard.

Eliza Shapiro, Abby Haglage and Caitlin Dickson did some awesome reporting for all 530+ representatives, digging through their voting records and previous public statements to distill their position to one of four categories: Opposes reform, Supports reform, Swing vote, or Unclear. We kept track of the sources, too, so that we could present representatives’ statements to the reader when the final thing was done. 

Brian Abelson was also around to rig together @RepsGunTweets (since renamed @YourRepsOnGuns), which served as both a tool to monitor reps’ statements to see what category they fell into, as well as an open feed for anyone interested in the topic to follow on Twitter. Read about how that was built in this blog post.

The interactive currently stacks up the number of reps in each category and lets you do a combination filter by different criteria such as chamber, party and state. You can see things like how likely legislation is to pass each chamber and where different states stand. Importantly, too, you can put in your address read information on your House representative and two Senators. Using information compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, it gives you their phone, fax (for those that prefer the fax), address, twitter, website and Facebook page so you can get in touch with them. We also pulled in each representatives NRA grade and their rating from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence to give more context to their legislative history.

My favorite part of it though, is that we’ll be updating it as the gun debate goes on. We’ve already received emails from readers who have contacted their reps with statements that we’ll add and one person sent us a local news story from their congressperson that will move him from the Oppose reform to a Swing vote. We’ll mark these updates on the landing page so people can follow along and readers can leave their email to be notified of updates.

We also did this as its own URL similar to how we did www.HavingTroubleVoting.com. As a resource and tool that was going to hopefully have a long life, we felt an easy to remember and dedicated page showed our readers that this was something they could keep coming back to.

Under the hood

The hardest part of this was getting all of the data from multiple different sources into one nice database. We had a few different people researching, different numbers coming in from different places, and multiple editors editing. We used Google Spreadsheets and good spreadsheet etiquette to make sure people were marking the categories the same way and joined them in R. 

To make the stance information simple to update, the map copies that information from the main table on load instead of storing it separately with the map data.

The main page uses Isotope.js, which we’ve used a bunch before. But this was a little tricky because we needed to sort them into four columns. Fortunately, there’s some crazy extension for Isotope that lets you do just that. The harder part was figuring out how to get it to display top to bottom instead of bottom to top. But buried in the “Tests” documentation was a page on how to make your elements stack right-to-left for languages like Hebrew and Arabic. It includes the settings to rotate the positioning, which worked.

The only fancy mapping feature is if you click on a district, the map automatically pans and zooms to fit the founds of that district. This is done using the ST_Envelope() function in PostGIS through CartoDB. ST_Envelope() returns the bounding box of a given feature which you can sent to Leaflet.js’s fitBounds() method to pan and zoom to that box. The only problem to be aware of is ST_Envelope() will give you an array of x and y values but fitBounds() is expecting the format to be in y then x (lat, then long). As long as you reorder the elements in your coordinate array, Leaflet will be happy.

Getting the aesthetics of the map right was a little tricky. I wanted to make sure that a highlighted feature’s outline appears above the other features but below its own fill so you get a bright white border and then a subtler inner border. If you follow the symbol drawing order and compositing option rules in CartoCSS it becomes manageable.

From the failures folder

Here’s what the original mock-up looked like, which we weren’t too far off from. I reworked the top nav hierarchy into two main buttons, added more color and turned the rep detail elements into three columns instead of rows so it was more compact and graphic.

-Michael

Some newsroom insight into how we built our tool to track where your Representative stands on guns. Check it out if you haven’t already!

This morning’s memo from our editor Tina Brown announcing Dan Klaidman being named our national political correspondent. Follow him (on Twitter)!

We screwed up. It shouldn’t have taken a wave of constructive criticism — but it has — to alert us that we’ve made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way. It’s safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out. We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge — sheepishly — that that we got ahead of ourselves. We are sorry, and we’re working very hard to put things right.

In which The Atlantic apologizes for running “sponsored content” praising the leader of the Church of Scientology. 

My cover story about Lance Armstrong, my affirmation of faith, was the worst piece of opinion I have ever written. I did a disservice to myself. More important I did a disservice to readers. I did believe what I wrote at the time. I do believe in staking out strong positions. We all do as columnists today, because of the world we live in, craving to differentiate ourselves from the thousands who populate the Internet every hour.
But I also knew that in trying to defend Armstrong and still insist he was a hero, I had to defy obvious reality: after years of threatening, even suing, those who had previously claimed he had blood-doped or used illegal performance enhancers, you don’t just simply walk away from the fight.

Buzz Bissinger regrets the time he still believed in Lance Armstrong.