Technologist turned journalist Brian Boyer was open to questions from journalism students before a lecture he was giving at Gaylord Hall concerning some of his projects.
Boyer, whose website shows him as having
worked for ProPublica, the Chicago Tribune, and now National Public Radio,
spoke about how he uses data in order to enhance his journalistic abilities. He
cited many of his own projects, but highlighted a search engine called Panda.
Boyer explained how Cook County, where
Chicago lies, has a website where a journalist could go and find any warrant
they needed, but only by last name. This renders the site almost useless,
because unless they journalist knows the name of the person, is it nearly
impossible to find the warrant. Journalists often need the reverse of this,
because they will often use the warrant to get the name of the person in order
to determine the newsworthiness of a story.
Boyer says there is no way to see the
warrants in chronological order, so he developed Panda, which uses code to go
into this data base and rip the information and rearrange it in a more useful
way on its own website. On the new website, you can search keywords to find
crime data, or even just see all the warrants in chronological order. He
describes Panda as, “sort of like a Wiki or an internal website for newsrooms
to store data and share it amongst themselves.”
The journalism students had a positive
response to the self-acclaimed hacker journalist’s visit. One student claimed
his work is “very cool”, and went on to say how nice it is to see a new angle
on journalism.
NPR
journalist Brian Boyer responds to a question from Tyler Jones about using
“hacking” as a method of journalism by explaining the PANDA software, which
helps Chicago journalists sift through crime data more efficiently. VIDEO: Eli J. Mapes (TRT: 1:35)
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