Mashup Websites, A Journalists Favorite Tool

Being a journalist in the world today requires much more than just having an uncanny ability to write and interview but to also be able to produce graphs, statistics and push your articles with whatever social media needs possible. So what ways do journalists produce the graphs that we see everyday featured with an article, and how do they journalists get these massive worldwide statistics without having to wait every 10 years for a new census to be published. There are some websites that many journalists are using to find this specific data.

StateMaster.com does a very good job to help any journalist or anyone simply interested in finding nearly any statistics. The best part about this website is that when you search a specific subject it breaks the information down by state and into graphs. Say you want to look at the rate of change of the number of people with healthcare. Simply enough you use the two pull down boxes to find health and in the second box % change in individual insurance. It is that easy to search a large database of information and have it broken down into mapping of health insurance information.

The problem that I have with this website is that the only way to view the information is in either a bar graph that is a bit confusing to read, or in a map broken down by state. I feel like there should be an easier way that they could show this information, but other than that this is a great tool for any journalist seeking tons of information or anyone simply curious about specific statistics.

Another website that I like titled This We Know, is a great site for anyone interested in a compilation of facts that would seem simple to find but simply aren’t easy to find. Its very easy to use all you do is type in the location you would like to know more information about, and it compiles this information into a nice list accompanied with a map, population and even mileage to nearby cities.

This site is fantastic and is a great tool for any journalist looking to find those hard to locate facts. I really like this site because of its simplicity and how there is even a link to the side of the fact that you can link that information straight to your Twitter.

The last website that I looked into is a great tool for anyone interested in a surplus of factual government information about activities, rule changes and proposed activities. GovPulse gives you the option to search nearly any information one can imagine as well as even search by location to find out what is going around in your city.

I did a quick simple search by city and looked at the most recent information about what is happening within 50 miles of Chicago. The information is published with an interactive map of where the certain activity or rule change takes place and you can even click on the location to find out more information about this activity or whatever it may be.

This is a great website with few flaws, and is great for any journalist trying to find information for an article that deals with any rule changes or proposed activities and where all this will take place.

These three websites are great tools for journalists trying to expand simplistic articles into interactive articles with great visuals and also a great way to fact check any information that they have received.