DXO

Category: Journalism

  • Chicago Sun-Times Editorial re: CityPayments:”You too can track city spending”

    Here’s an editorial from today’s Sun-Times.www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/1653034,CST-EDT-edit06b….July 6, 2009Ever hear about the City of Chicago spending money on something and think to yourself, that’s just goofy?Just the other day, Ald. Ed Burke griped about the city paying a contractor $915 every time it hauls a body to the morgue, while noting that other cities pay far…

  • The Launch of CityPayments

    Today I helped launch CityPayments. Here’s a snippet from the launch blog post: Take a look at CityPayments, a database of all vendors, contracts, and payments that have been posted by the municipal government of the City of Chicago to the Vendor, Contract, and Payment Search lookup tool maintained by the Department of Procurement Services.

  • PANEL: Chicago Future of Media Conference

    I took part in a panel called, “How do people consume the news, and what do they do with it?”. Here’s some video: Here’s Michael Miner’s take, and a little follow-up I wrote.

  • LEGISLATION: Chicago Sun-Times Editorial: City Council keeping info in TIF funds in black hole

    Here’s an editorial in today’s Sun-Times.www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/1488786,CST-EDT-edit22b….March 22, 2009It was a modest proposal. Two aldermen, Manny Flores and Scott Waguespack, suggested shedding some light on the city’s TIF district deals by putting information on the Internet.TIF stands for tax increment financing, but as we have explained before, this is what they really are: Mayor Daley’s private…

  • An Annotated Look at the San Francisco Port-a-Potty Arsons

    Here’s a pretty good example of deep-ferreting data to figure things out.

  • King County Restaurant Inspection Fix

    My investigations led to fixing an error in the publication of King County restaurant data. I spoke with Hilary Karasz — her tech guy, Mark, fixed the error in the publication of their data.They are once again publishing violation information on their site.It also appears that they have gone back and re-published to records during…

  • LAUNCH: New York Attorney General Expired Pharmacy Products Investigation Locations

    Today at EveryBlock we launched a new project: New York Attorney General Expired Pharmacy Products Investigation Locations. It’s one thing to read a story about an investigation of expired products in pharmacies across your state, but it’s another thing altogether to see that your drugstore has been selling expired products.

  • LAUNCH: “Operation Crooked Code”

    LAUNCH: “Operation Crooked Code”

    Today I helped launch the first EveryBlock Special Report, Operation Crooked Code. Here’s some notes on the work, from the announcement blog post: The first EveryBlock special report is a great one: Operation Crooked Code. A week or so ago, 15 people were arrested on bribery charges as part of a federal probe into corruption…