Patchwork Nation is a project covering complicated national issues from a local perspective with a lot of data to back it up. It’s a way to talk about tough subjects–politics, the economy, race, religion, culture–in a human way. It’s also a set of tools to find stories in data that might otherwise be missed.
Production notes:
This was my first major project for the NewsHour. I built the Django application that feeds data into the map and controls the county and community type pages.
The Flash map was built by an outside vendor, and I created hooks to manage it via Django’s admin interface. The database stores close to a half-million individual statistics covering population, ethnicity, religion and culture.
Blogs are imported from a handful of sources and platforms, including the Christian Science Monitor (Wordpress MU), community bloggers (Blogger) and the NewsHour.
Journalists need new tools to work online. In the last year, I’ve used more that I can count, most of them free, to find and tell better stories on the Web.
Back in October, I started building an online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I was using. It has since grown into something I think others will find useful, so I’m releasing it into the wild.
The site is in public beta for now. Eventually, I hope to move it to its own domain.
Anyone can browse this site and subscribe to an RSS feed. Registering allows you to add new tools, add links to existing tools and bookmark tools, which will be saved on your contributor page.
Funded by and produced for Spot.us. See other places this story has been published here. For production notes, read below.
Can California’s cement industry walk the fine line between regulation and innovation to fight global warming?
CUPERTINO, California–From the lip of the quarry at Hanson Permanente cement, all of Santa Clara stretches out in panorama. (Photos here).
Few plants in California are this close to this many people. Most of the state’s 11 kilns are well away from population centers, close enough for workers to commute, but otherwise out of sight.
Here, houses reach right up to the edges the Permanente land, where suburban homes suddenly give way to an industrial road leading up to the expansive plant and the limestone mining operation behind it.
Here, engineers and executives will have to figure out how to make an essentially dirty process clean, or at least cleaner.
As California tries to fight global warming–with or without the rest of the country–cement manufacturing remains one of the trickiest industries to regulate.
“I don’t think there’s anybody quite like cement,” said Mike Tollstrup, one of the state officials overseeing California’s effort to fight global warming on its own. “There are not a lot of facilities. Cement is used everywhere. There are significant issues of leakage. If we don’t do it right, the potential for increasing emissions is a real concern.” Read the rest of this entry »
16-year couple marry less than a month before Proposition 8 hits the ballot, as many same-sex couples are now doing (slide show)
HAYWARD — With quiet vows and an eye toward November’s Proposition 8 referendum, Stephanie Sue Spencer and the Rev. Arlene Nehring made their 16-year union a legal California marriage in Hayward’s Eden United Church of Christ, where Nehring presides as pastor.
This “much-awaited day” wasn’t quite the wedding they’d hoped for, but with voters going to the polls in a month in an election that could make their union unconstitutional, the couple felt it was better now than never.
“People are hedging their bets,” said Todd Bove, a member of the church who married his partner of 10 years just a month ago. Read the rest of this entry »
HAYWARD — This is what the tactical team knows: They are protecting a speaker who is strongly against immigration. The day before she is set to deliver an address to students at Cal State East Bay, someone calls in a death threat to the university. The tactical team’s job: keep her alive.
This is only a drill, but an important one.
Across Alameda County, tactical teams from 25 law enforcement agencies are going through 48 hours of simulated disasters, terrorist attacks, riots and jail breaks, from 6 a.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Monday. In all, 1,700 people are involved in making look real a long list of answers to the question: What’s the worst that could happen? Read the rest of this entry »
This map was part of a larger project on Chinese real estate. I built it in Zeemaps using data organized in and imported from a Google spreadsheet. The interactive version is available here.
Terry “Big T” Williams pours his blues out over a swaying crowd, music and sweat rolling off him, green guitar howling.
“I’ll play the blues for you,” he sings, and he delivers on the promise.
The sound comes from the Mississippi Delta, translated and augmented on its way to the West Coast, to Russell City, where a new blues emerged.
Playing in front of Hayward City Hall on Saturday, Williams captures the endpoints of a musical journey espoused by the annual Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival.
“West Coast music is mutt music,” Ronnie Stewart, founder of the Bay Area Blues Society, explains. “It’s a mixture of everything.” Read the rest of this entry »
James Buck is famous on Twitter. The photojournalist and UC Berkeley graduate student used the messaging service to text “Arrested” as Egyptian police took him into custody on April 10, and after a flood of media coverage, he was released the next day. But Buck would like a different name remembered: Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, his 23-year-old interpreter, who was taken at the same time.
Maree may still be in prison. The veterinary student has been held in a high-security facility called Borg al Arab outside Alexandria since his arrest two months ago, and while local news reports say he may be freed soon, neither Buck nor aid workers in his case could be certain. Maree has been tortured, Buck and others allege. According to his family and Human Rights Watch, he has gone on a hunger strike and been put in solitary confinement. Agents of the interior ministry have allegedly threatened the family, saying that Maree will never be released, even though no charges have officially been filed. Other organizers of the April protests have gotten out, but Maree, for a time, was simply lost in the system. Read the rest of this entry »
Alameda hosted its 14th Relay for Life on Saturday and Sunday, with 400 people on 26 teams walking the track at Encinal High School for 24 hours.
The Alameda Relay’s goal was to raise $130,000 in the event to go toward research, education and support of local services, such as driving cancer patients to therapy.
The relay included the first lap dedicated to survivors, and a luminaria ceremony, with candles in sand lining the track to light the way for walkers through the night to dedicated to loved ones who have had cancer.
This year’s theme was “Celebrate, Remember, Fight back.”
“Survivors celebrate that they made it through the treatment. And of course they remember the friends they’ve lost. And we encourage everyone to fight back,” said Emilia Stephens, the Relay’s team captain coordinator. Read the rest of this entry »
Biaggio Parma is “trying to hold a little bit of history that’s fast sliding away.” This jeep was a reconnaissance vehicle in Europe during the Second World War.
Parma served in the US Navy from 1957 to ‘61, working as an electrician aboard an aircraft carrier. Read the rest of this entry »
