cheatsheet:

I am very pleased to tell you that Josh Rogin is joining The Daily Beast as senior correspondent later this month, covering politics and national security. We are thrilled to have Josh’s talents joining those of Eli Lake, Eleanor Clift, Michael Tomasky, Michelle Cottle, Daniel Klaidman, David Freedlander, Stuart Stevens, Jon Favreau and David Frum as part of The Beast’s re-energized team under John Avlon’s direction.  

Josh has been a senior staff writer with Foreign Policy magazine since 2009 where he has extensively covered the State and Defense departments, the National Security Council, Congress and the diplomatic communities. He previously wrote on foreign policy for Congressional Quarterly and has also contributed to the Washington Post. Josh is a graduate of the George Washington University, he speaks Japanese and is a recipient of the National Press Foundation’s Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship and the 2011 recipient of the Interaction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He is originally from Philadelphia and lives currently in Washington, DC.

Please join me in welcoming Josh!

Tina

So this happened today. Our foreign policy team is getting pretty awesome.

lostreib:

It’s that time again…America’s Best High Schools time. The list this year is really phenomenal. It’s expanded to 2,000 schools. Nearly 50% more schools applied to be on the list. The methodology was tweaked every-so-slightly, strengthening the metric by which we measure schools. And it includes an interactive, which has been a goal since I first helped to put the list together in 2011.

Just like last year, the process was rewarding and challenging. This was the first time I was the only person to put the list together, which was certainly the biggest hurdle. 

Ultimately, the list is about the schools. At the risk of sounding trite, many of the teachers and administrators of the nation’s top schools work incredibly hard with very few resources and little pay off. There isn’t a blueprint for making students learn or care about learning. 

At it’s core, the list is meant to spotlight great schools. I think it’s getting there.

Lauren worked tirelessly pulling together our list of America’s best high schools. Follow her!

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.

cynicaltechnophile:

newsweek:

What BP Doesn’t Want You To Know About The 2012 Gulf Oil Spill

“It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” 

That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.

“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.

It was the opening weeks of what everyone, echoing President Barack Obama, was calling “the worst environmental disaster in American history.” At 9:45 p.m. local time on April 20, 2010, a fiery explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had killed 11 workers and injured 17. One mile underwater, the Macondo well had blown apart, unleashing a gusher of oil into the gulf. At risk were fishing areas that supplied one third of the seafood consumed in the U.S., beaches from Texas to Florida that drew billions of dollars’ worth of tourism to local economies, and Obama’s chances of reelection. Republicans were blaming him for mishandling the disaster, his poll numbers were falling, even his 11-year-old daughter was demanding, “Daddy, did you plug the hole yet?”

Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.

Within days, the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches. She lost her voice. “My throat felt like I’d swallowed razor blades,” she says.

Then things got much worse.

Like hundreds, possibly thousands, of workers on the cleanup, Griffin soon fell ill with a cluster of excruciating, bizarre, grotesque ailments. By July, unstoppable muscle spasms were twisting her hands into immovable claws. In August, she began losing her short-term memory. After cooking professionally for 10 years, she couldn’t remember the recipe for vegetable soup; one morning, she got in the car to go to work, only to discover she hadn’t put on pants. The right side, but only the right side, of her body “started acting crazy. It felt like the nerves were coming out of my skin. It was so painful. My right leg swelled—my ankle would get as wide as my calf—and my skin got incredibly itchy.”

[Photo: Benjamin Lowy/Getty]

Not entirely certain how reliable “The Daily Beast” is. taking with a grain of salt.

First off, this is from Newsweek. And the writer is a Fellow of the New American Foundation who has written about global warming for outlets including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, NPR, the BBC and The Nation, per his bio. He is the author of six books that have been translated into sixteen languages. Put down the salt. It’s not healthy for you anyways. 

newsbeastlabs:

Last month we published a package of stories marking the fortieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. It had a few moving parts but I’ll just go over some of them briefly here.

How it started

This summer you probably heard the story about the last abortion clinic in Mississippi that was threatened to close due to stricter state laws. Allison Yarrow, who sat across from me at the time, was covering the story and it got us thinking: the line “The Last Abortion Clinic in Mississippi” is attention grabbing, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. That is to say, what you really want to know is how far are people away from their nearest clinic, regardless of state boundaries. One state may have five clinics but if they’re all in the southwest corner of the state and you live in the northeast corner, and your adjoining states have multiple clinics but only at their borders farthest from you, then you’ll have a hard time getting to a clinic, even if you had many in your state. To see where this might be the case and where access to services was compounded by new restrictive provisions (over 150 nationally in the past two years) we made as close to a comprehensive database as possible of every abortion clinic. Our goal was to see what parts of the country were farthest from a clinic. From start to finish, this process took about six months. 

Curious about “the process”? Read on.

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

This is a question we see come through the ol’ Ask box from time to time, and it’s never truly a very easy one to answer. Looking around the newsroom, our colleagues come from a wide array of backgrounds, and there’s not really a point A-to-point B path to become a journalist (other than, we suppose, going to J school, but even then who knows). 

David Carr’s doing a Reddit AMA right now and he just answered this question rather succinctly, so here you go:

The tools of journalism are in your hands and no one is going to give a damn about what is on your resume, they want to see what you have made with your own little fingies. Can you use Final Cut Pro? Have you created an Instagram that is about something besides a picture of your cat every time she rolls over? Is HTML 5 a foreign language to you? Is your social media presence dominated by a picture of your beer bong, or is it an RSS of interesting stuff that you add insight to? People who are doing hires will have great visibility into what you can actually do, what you care about and how you can express on any number of platforms.

via Reddit

Oh hey!

Interested in gifs, Twitter, and “the news”? We’re looking for a winter/spring social media intern (based in New York and eligible to receive school credit) to join the team behind nwktumblr. Apply today! Just don’t forget to mention tumblr somewhere in your application. That’s pretty much how you’ll get past the first round.

Click here to apply and see more details.

newsbeastlabs:

For the holidays, we wanted to make the normal gift guide idea a little more interesting. The answer was a flow chart that narrows down the type of person you’re shopping for and then suggests appropriate gifts for their particular sub-culture. Lizzie Crocker and Isabel Wilkinson did a great job coming up with the categories like (Nostalgic Outdoorsman, The Closet ‘50 Shades’ Fan, Hipster Techie) and then Lizzie and I (Michael) put our heads together to make a (hopefully) witty flowchart. Our photo department headed by Marica Allert was also a huge help.

There’s nothing fancy under the hood. The only semi-trick was our Daily Beast font family Titling isn’t always too legible at smaller sizes on the web. To fix that, we made the blue circles in Illustrator and exported them as PNGs. To do the hovers, you duplicate the image below your main image like this and make sure your image container is only tall enough to show one at a time: 

To do the hover then, your CSS is something like .img-class:hover{ background-position: 0 -102px;} The benefit to this is you don’t load a second picture when you hover so there’s no delay. This is a pretty standard way of doing this so it’s nothing revolutionary but for some reason you still see a lot of sites that have delays on their image hovers that would be better off using this technique.

Why not make the flowchart interactive too?

We decided in favor of a static image for the flowchart as opposed to something interactive since I think the wittiness of flowcharts comes across in seeing how the possibilities flow from one another and the different results in choosing one adventure over another. Also, at the sake of sounding blasphemous, interactivity can be thought of as a last resort only when you can’t fit everything onto the screen at once, or doing so would work against a focused narrative. It’s much easier for readers to scan a page full of information and see how these options unfold, in my view, than it is for them to click 10+ times and only see the options that stem from their responses. 

-michael

Journalism nerds, rejoice! Here’s a look beneath the surface at how we put together our little gift guide flowchart interactive.