Chris Amico: Journalist

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.

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.