Journalism

3/11 Video Map: http://jp.1rick.com Update: It's now at QuakeMap.org

Some of you may recall the Newfoundland Hurricane video map I made back last September. I was a little fed up at the time with what I thought was primarily story-based disaster reporting from local news orgs, when there was an enormous amount of user-generated YouTube clips of the storm that were not being taken advantage of.

Like many people in the weeks following the earthquake, I found myself trying to wrap my head around radiation data. I’ve been a big fan of data journalists/geeks for the past couple of years, and many of these people were doing great work after the quake. I tried to point them out on my own website by gathering their “quaketools,” and by writing a short feature in The Japan Times about data visualization.

If you were following my Twitter stream recently, you may have seen some messages I sent out as I was covering some volleyball matches here in Tokyo. Reporting on International volleyball presented a couple of problems right off the bat for me:

I recently completed a piece on CNNgo.com about the best places to run in Tokyo. These sort of lists tend to make me uncomfortable, and this one would be impossible unless I ran all of the trails personally — tricky to say the least.

Just so there's no confusion -- I'm not a trained journalist, nor have I ever worked inside a traditional newsroom. Having said that, I think that part of the reason that I manage to find some writing work these days is because I'm doing things a little differently.

I don't do stuff like this very often, but last night I had a chance to spill my guts to about 30 or 40 people on a topic that I've kinda been obsessing over for quite a while. I've met a lot of people who write for a living over the past few months, and I always find myself recommending certain tools or a workflow tweak to help them do what they do a little bit better.

Maybe I gush about this stuff too much, who knows...