Chris Amico: Journalist

The PBS NewsHour’s Gulf Leak Meter grew out of a simple question: How much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 and sank two days later?

Given a starting point and a flow rate, figuring out how much has spilled isn’t actually that hard: Total = Rate x Time. But choosing the correct rate was probably impossible. Official estimates went from 1,000 barrels a day to 5,000 to somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000. As more information trickled out, independent scientists said the leak could be as high as 100,000 barrels per day.

So the challenge was to build a tool that would do simple math, but had all the uncertainty of the situation baked in. Hence the slider. That way, we let users pick which estimates they believe, and the ticker shows them how much oil has leaked into the Gulf based on that figure.

When BP began siphoning oil directly out of the well using a mile-long tube, I rewrote part of the code to subtract that amount from the leak rate–after the user had picked a leak rate. When BP increased, then decreased, the amount of oil it was capturing, I rewrote the main function again. Now, each time BP tells us how much oil it is sucking up, we create another time segment, adjusted by the siphoned amount, and add it to the total. If this sounds confusing, well, thank BP.

Production notes

The widget itself is embeddable as an iframe. It is built entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. An explanation of the math and a working (though deliberately incorrect) version is available here.

Coverage and Commentary

Al Tompkins, Poynter Online: Virtual Meter Lets Viewers Estimate How Much Oil Is Leaking in Gulf

So far, nothing — not the oily birds or the nasty-looking ribbon of waste floating on the Gulf of Mexico’s surface — has stunned me as much as this rolling graphic from, of all places, the website of the PBS “NewsHour.”

MediaPost: The 100 Most Important Online Publishers

Look no further than the depressing widget Newshour created and the video feed it adapted to keep the public informed about the BP Gulf oil spill disaster and you’ll see why Public Broadcasting still matters online.

PBS MediaShift: 6 Key Lessons From NewsHour’s Coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill

My own debriefing of what worked and what we learned covering the spill.

Last night the NewsHour went all-in covering State of the Union. We had on-air analysis, video from the Capitol and coverage on our new blog, and a new app to annotate the speech as it happened.

The Analyzer (I can never think of clever names for my apps; this is what everyone here calls it) is built in Django, with a lot of help from jQuery. From pitch to launch took exactly a week, including a working weekend.

Read more about the project on my blog.

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.