Josh Williams » Journalism

It’s always brighter at the Sun

Josh — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:14:51 +0000

I moved to Las Vegas in September to be a newspaper man. Or at least the “news” in newspaper man. I loved Washington and the Smithsonian, but I really wanted to work for a news organization. Out of the blue, I was invited to be part of a new, world-class team building a newspaper Web site from scratch.

Many long, long nights and work-filled weekends later, we’ve finally launched. We put up the site late last week to coincide with the second Nevada Democratic debate and today’s Nevada caucus.

Check it out at: http://www.lasvegassun.com.

Some of my favorite features of the site:

Clean, open design by Sun staffers Bill Gaspard and Tyson Evans. Tyson, trained as a print designer, learned some pretty wicked CSS very quickly to build the site. He also designs a content-specific main content block each evening.
Huge photo galleries. Our in-house flash viewer scales to any size (go ahead, hit the fullscreen button) and the photos are dynamically sized by the server to look good at almost any resolution.
Our HD video strategy. The details are still being worked out, but the video widget should hint at where we’re going. Even now, you can download 720p HD video, in addition to iPod-sized video. And we’re not wasting the resources on crappy video. I think you’ll see some great video stories come out of this “newspaper.”

And we have some exciting things happening behind the scenes. Most importantly, outside the network layer, most of our technology infrastructure is built and managed by our editorial tech team, with editorial goals and deadlines in mind. We use a Python/Django-based CMS that our (crazy smart )programmers Doug Tywman and Kit Dallege can hack at a moment’s notice. Our Flash widgets are mostly built by Zach Wise, our multimedia guru, and can be adjusted at any time. We can add storage to our servers, tweak the database and drop in utility servers – like a streaming server – whenever we want, even in the middle of the night as news breaks. It’s flexible and very freeing.

Our team and strategy might be a little unorthodox but I think it will serve us and our audience well. Keep an eye out for more features and projects launching in the coming months.

Web Scraping The Census With PHP

Josh — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:23:58 +0000

The Census Bureau is a treasure trove of information about communities. But sometimes getting to the data and making sense of it takes a bit of work. It can be hard to find the data and even harder to wade through it, especially if you want to use it in a Web application. To help, Professor Wendell Cochran at American University asked me to work with him on a tutorial for journalistic datamining for the Knight Citizen News Network, a University of Maryland project sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

I built a simple PHP script that parses the American FactFinder and graphs relevant data. We used race data in our examples, but the code is easily adaptable to any FactFinder data.

Read the article and download the code at the Knight Citizen News Network Web site.

Don’t Blink Or You’ll Miss

Josh — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:19:32 +0000

CBS Evening News aired a short piece last night about the National Zoo’s most recent giant panda artificial insemination attempt. Four or five of the shots are from footage I shot Wednesday night and the Zoo released to the press yesterday morning.

All of the B-roll of the procedure is mine; it totals about six seconds.

While I enjoyed the CBS piece, my favorite coverage was Defending Our Pandynasty.

Links
Direct Link To Video At CBS
JoGayle Howard Interview With Additional Footage
CBS Evening News Online Package