May 23, 2007, 11:53 AM ET
A new journo-programmer scholarship
Along with my own big grant announcement, I'm excited about many of the other Knight News Challenge winners, most notably the grant given to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Medill received a grant to offer full journalism scholarships for geeks. Essentially, they're looking to train the next generation of journalist-programmers, and I'm really excited to see that. If you're a computer scientist looking to get into journalism (a rewarding and important field), you would do well to check out the scholarship and apply.
May 23, 2007, 11:45 AM ET
Knight Foundation grant
I'm thrilled to announce some huge news: I've been awarded a grant by the Knight Foundation, as part of the Knight News Challenge program.
I'll be founding a Web startup, EveryBlock, that focuses on making local news and information useful. I've been feeling the entrepreneurial itch for a while and can't wait to start hacking on this with a crack team of Web developers. Expect to hear much more about this from me, including job ads.
The sad part of all this is that I'm leaving my job at washingtonpost.com. I've had a fantastic time there and recommend it wholeheartedly as a place to work. They gave me an incredible amount of freedom and a chance to work on substantial, meaningful projects with brilliant people. Washingtonpost.com is the best mainstream news Web site, with equal attention devoted to preserving quality journalism and inventing new forms thereof. I'm grateful, proud and honored to have been associated with it.
Now, it's time to start a new chapter.
May 1, 2007, 12:16 AM ET
New at work: Presidential candidate tracker
At work, we recently launched Campaign Tracker, a browsable database of campaign events planned by the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates. This is the latest section of The Presidential Field, washingtonpost.com's guide to the '08 presidential elections.
The site's goals are to compile as much information about candidates' travel as possible and to make it easy to browse all of that information in a variety of ways. Our staff has done a great job compiling all of this.
The list of candidates gives you an overview of recent and upcoming campaign events. Each candidate gets his or her own page (e.g., Mike Huckabee). In addition, each candidate gets a page for each state he or she has visited -- e.g., Mike Huckabee's visits to Iowa, or the full list of states Barack Obama has visited.
You can browse by date on a color-coded calendar, and, of course, each day has its own permalink (e.g., April 13, 2007). Each state gets its own page, too, so you can keep an eye on past and future candidate visits to Illinois, for example.
We've got RSS feeds for every candidate and every state, too. Full information is here.
The site is fully Django powered.
Finally, everything integrates with the other apps we've been churning out, such as the Q1 campaign finance data and candidate bios. There's more to come, of course. Suggestions and ideas welcome.
