Tech Tip: Getting starting with PostGIS for geographic analysis
By Nick McClellanFor journalists hoping to analyze geographic data, the cost of geographic information system (GIS) software can be prohibitive. Fortunately, there are open-source, free solutions available for cost-cutting journalists who want to do spatial analysis.
Pursuing an open-source option is easier said than done. Often, open-source software can be difficult for the lay journalist to install and even begin to understand.
PostGIS for PostgreSQL database manager offers a solution that is free, robust and easy to use — assuming you know what you're doing.
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By Elizabeth Lucas
When journalists are looking for software, they usually greet the words "open source" in one of two ways: with confusion, because open source software is still a daunting mystery; or with delight, because the software is available for free.
Open source software is simply software that is available at no cost and has its source code available to the public. A network of users and developers constantly enhances and expands the program.
By Paul D'Ambrosio
New Jersey residents have long lived under a broken property tax system that has more in common with feudal states than the United States. Nearly half of our $47 billion in tax revenue comes from property taxes — which are based on the government's perceived value of a person's home rather than what he or she actually earns.
The average property tax in 2008: $7,045, or about 11 percent of the median household income. It's about four times higher than the national average, and higher than what the average worker pays in Social Security and Medicare taxes, combined.
By Jake Kreinberg
In February, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, designed to stimulate the economy by injecting $787 billion into the nation’s infrastructure and tax relief programs. Getting a handle on that spending has proved a challenge.
By Chris Hamby
Des Moines Register reporters Chase Davis and Perry Beeman spent months compiling and making sense of data for a series on air pollution in Iowa. But, with more than 1,600 polluting facilities across the state, there simply wasn’t space in the stories to mention any but the most noteworthy. That’s where data editor James Wilkerson and digital projects editor Michael Corey came in. They developed an interactive map that allowed users to see information about the facilities near them. "It localized the story to basically every community in Iowa," Davis said of the map.
By Derek Willis
Assessing the health of the nation's water is a daunting task, and the subject of an ongoing New York Times series called "Toxic Waters." It can't be done through data alone, but there is plenty of data available, particularly at the federal level. But working with it proved to be a difficult and occasionally frustrating task. Here's the story behind the database that we built for our readers.
By Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein
California's Board of Registered Nursing oversees more licensees, some 350,000, than any state nursing agency in the country. It is responsible for ensuring that nurses at patients' bedsides are not only competent, but sober, sane and law-abiding. So when we became suspicious that the board was fumbling its duties, leaving members of the public at risk, we wanted to ground our reporting in more than anecdotes, although those were rich and plentiful. Figuring out how to do this proved both time-consuming and hugely rewarding.
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