Analyze this!

Another great opportunity to learn in Propublica was by meeting Scott Klein, the Editor of News Applications.

Klein’s responsibility in Propublica includes directing journalistic software development and multimedia production.

This long title might be a simplification for Klein’s main job which is sarcastically enough simplifying complicated issues investigated by Propublica as energy, financial and political stories into visual shapes making them easier to understand by the website visitors.

Klein and his team is responsible for creating projects like this http://www.propublica.org/tools which don’t only explain a complicated story but also gives the user or the reader the opportunity to interact and to choose how he wants to display a story or navigates the facts which is a process representing the future of journalism.

The Editor of news applications in Propublica introduced me to a free online application called many eyes that can be found at http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/.

Many eyes enables anyone to visualize data in different graphic forms, topics like economy, finance, energy, sports or even politics can be much easier by visualizing information.

It is much easier for the readers to understand a timetable full of numbers and variables in the form of a graphic than reading it and make an additional effort to analyze what they read.

Graphics are widely used in American and European newspapers and there are some news services that offer graphic as they send news and photos to their subscribers, however using online tools enables everyone to customize graphics and shapes for their data.

In this post I used the data available in Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships website regarding the distribution of fellows who participated before in the program.

A simple example that can’t be found in a graphic service and in the same time can give the reader the impact of AFPF on journalism worldwide in a glance.