Knight Foundation
To help news organizations better use public information by creating PANDA, new software that cleans up and aids in analyzing it.
To help news organizations better use public information, the PANDA Project, in partnership with Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), the Chicago Tribune and The Spokane Spokesman-Review, will build a set of open-source, web-based tools that make it easier for journalists to use and analyze data. While national news organizations often have the staff and know-how to handle federal data, smaller news organizations are at a disadvantage. City and state data are messier, and newsroom staff often lack the tools to use it. PANDA will work with tools like Google Refine to find relationships among data sets and improve data sets for use by others. PANDA will be simple to deploy, allowing newsrooms without software developers on staff to integrate it into their work.
Brian Boyer is news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune. He runs projects, designs products and writes code, all in the name of journalism. He earned a master’s in journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, on a scholarship for developers funded by Knight Foundation. He was the 2010 Chicago Tribune employee of the year.