blog – Derek Willis

The A in AI Stands for Archives

The following is based on a talk I gave at American University on Oct. 25, 2024.

All Foreign Gifts Around Us

Whenever American federal officials - from the President to members of Congress and executive branch employees - meet with foreign government representatives, they often are…

Why I Mostly Don’t Use AI for Campaign Finance … Yet

If there’s anything that I’ve developed an expertise in in the past 25 years, it’s campaign finance data. And if there’s anything I’ve been really into during the past year…

Lessons from Teaching a Journalism Class on AI

I called it my “running with scissors” class, because after I offered to teach a course on using artificial intelligence for journalism, the thought dawned on me that I had…

A Better Way to Process Mississippi Precinct Results

When it comes to turning official precinct election results into data, there are few states like Mississippi.

Introducing Women’s College Volleyball Roster Data

Last year some students of mine at Maryland and I worked to produce a comprehensive set of data on women’s college basketball rosters, and while that process involved a lot…

Using AI to Parse Election Results

If there’s one state that justifies the need for OpenElections, it’s Mississippi. Unlike some other states that don’t have a centralized election results system, Mississippi…

West Virginia High School Football Blowouts

It has been a long time since I covered high school football in any way. The previous century, in fact.

How Newsrooms Should be Talking About AI

If you’ve heard about news organizations using AI, chances are you’ve heard about some bad choices. Maybe it was CNET publishing AI-written stories with “very dumb errors”…

What Was That?

If you were at Secu stadium on Oct. 14 for the Maryland-Illinois game and saw the Terrapins run the ball on third and six from the Illinois 29-yard line late in the game…

Teaching News Apps with Codespaces - The Results

Turns out removing barriers works

Teaching News Apps with Codespaces

How to spend less time on setup and level the playing field

Teaching Journalism with ChatGPT

Why I want students to enagage with AI services

What is Happening in Morgantown?

How WVU, GitHub Actions & Datasette Produce Good Questions

Welcome Back

A new beginning, but not entirely.

The More Important Problem

The first indication that I did not approach this NICAR-L improvement project in the right way should have been when I posted on GitHub a CSV file with metadata from 16…

The NICAR-L Improvement Project

If you’re coming to the 2019 CAR Conference in March, chances are you’re a member of the NICAR-L listserv. The only session idea I pitched this year was on how to make the…

The Best Training

I’ve been asked by students what the best training is to be a journalist. My position on this is very clear: waiting tables at a honeymoon resort is the best training.

Academy Fight Song, Part 2

It begins, as so many things do these days, with a tweet.

Government and Civic Tech

Looking at what has happened to civic technology organizations at the national level lately, you could get the impression that the federal government, having absorbed some…

My Favorite Things

As first reported on the tweets, I have a new job, at ProPublica, where I’ll be working on news applications, investigations and other incredible stuff with the News Apps team…

Civic Data and Journalism

A solid foundation of publicly available, consistent civic data - think of election results, voting information and other political records - is more important than ever for…

We’re All Publishers Now

Last weekend I had myself a proper Twitter rant.

Lightning Strikes

On November 19, 2009, Jaimi Dowdell of Investigative Reporters & Editors sent an email to more than a dozen of us asking about some ideas for advanced sessions for the 2010…

How It Starts

Tomorrow is Aron Pilhofer’s last day at The New York Times.

Data Journalism, Student Media Edition

I had the privilege of speaking to students (and some faculty) at Duke University on Monday, and it was inspiring to see so many people come out to listen to a very geeky…

The Natives Aren’t Restless Enough

A couple of points to start with, in the hopes of not wasting readers’ time and preparing for some reactions:

Teaching Hospitals, Journalism Education and a Hatchet Job

Donica Mensing and David Ryfe from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, have published a paper that attempts to argue that recent attempts by…

Why Develop in the Newsroom?

Nearly a decade ago, I sat with a group of Python developers around a table at a Vietnamese restaurant in Washington, D.C.’s Cleveland Park neighborhood and told them what…

What Good is Dat?

Max Ogden, a one-man band of interesting civic (and other) coding, has a new project called dat. Dat is “a new initiative that seeks to increase the traction of the open…

Lessons from ‘Data-Crunched Democracy’

Last Friday I traveled to Philadelphia for Data-Crunched Democracy, a conference drawing together political consultants, data analysis and targeting professionals, academics…

What They Say About Us

As journalism buzzwords go these days, analytics has a lot going for it. The term is broad enough to encompass a wide range of ideas, ranging from the “dark side” where the…

Academy Fight Song

What’s that I hear
The sound of marching feet
It has a strange allure
Has a strange allure
Mission of Burma, “Academy Fight Song”

The Itemizer

Here’s a little secret about me: I love campaign finance data.

Steve Coll

I have a ton of respect for Steve Coll, who was named dean of the Columbia Journalism School on Monday. He was the managing editor of The Washington Post when I started…

Mobile Apps - Where the data lives

At first glance, I wasn’t sure how useful a mobile app for presidential documents would be. After all, it’s not too often that I am on the go and need to see the contents of…

Magic Removal

Few may remember this, but Aaron Swartz kickstarted Django’s magic-removal effort years ago. Django is 1000x better thanks to his feedback. — Adrian Holovaty (@adrianholovaty…

On Aaron Swartz

After trading some emails with Aaron Swartz in 2004 and 2005 about building a congressional votes database, I began to entertain a ridiculous fantasy: maybe, just maybe, I…

The Data-Driven Congressional Reporter

Washington is full of reporters who excel at finding and building sources, or at knowing which documents to look for and when. Those are skills that take time to develop and…

On Vengeance

I was 23 years old when I saw someone die, and my first thought about it is that I don’t recommend the experience.

Thoughts on NewsFoo

In NewsFoo style, a brief introduction to this post:

How I Got Here

I meant to finish this by Thanksgiving, as a way of acknowledging the key role that female mentors have played in my career. Better late than never.

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

A link dump of election-related work that I’ve contributed to as part of The New York Times’ coverage of the final months of the campaign. In every instance these involved…

Congressional Data on GitHub - A Way Forward

Two years ago, there was a round of blog posts touched off by Clay Johnson that asked, “Why shouldn’t there be a GitHub for data?” My own view at the time was that…

Share Your Knowledge

Unlike my friends at The Chicago Tribune, I have no logo to display, but my message here is as important as “Show Your Work”: Share Your Knowledge. In fact, it’s hard to do…

Finding New Money

My colleague Raymond Hernandez has a story about an unusual aspect of New York Democratic congressman Charlie Rangel’s fundraising: after years of raising millions to help…

Lost in the Weeds

The indefatigable Alex Howard posted a link today about a draft academic paper on open source and journalism by Nikki Usher of George Washington University and Seth Lewis of…

Our Mark Knoller Problem

My colleagues at The Times (and other folks I know who cover the White House) tell me that Mark Knoller, the CBS Radio reporter who reports on the president, is a genuinely…

On Legislative Data Transparency

This week I was honored to speak at at the Legislative Data and Transparency Conference put on by the Committee on House Administration. If you’re so inclined, the videos of…

What We Don’t Know About Elections

If you happened to be at the recent Online News Association conference in Boston and happened to attend the session on covering the 2012 elections, then a good bit of this…

In Defense of Building Tools

My first job in Web development was as a member of washingtonpost.com’s “Tools Team.” I was, in title if not in practice, a Tool.

Why Teach SQL?

There was an interesting discussion on the NICAR-L listserv today about teaching database skills. More specifically, which software to teach and how to teach it. Should you…

Interviewing Data

To my mother’s regret, I was never the literature lover she is. And I am not remotely the writer I might have been expected to be, given that my parents both taught English…

What APIs Mean for Data Journalists

Anthony DeBarros of USA Today and I talked about APIs at this year’s CAR conference in Raleigh. We got a lot of “Web people”, to use a lame expression, in the audience. If…

Why Students Should Come to the CAR Conference

Update: the student price for the conference, $100, does not include IRE membership. That’s $25. Both are bargains.

Hard Problems

I wasn’t going to respond to Ellen Miller’s comments on my previous post, mostly because I thought I had said what I wanted to. But now that O’Reilly has picked up on things…

How Far We’ve Come

There’s been a bit of discussion lately in the open government community about how to assess federal government efforts at meaningful transparency. Of the stuff I’ve heard…

A GitHub for Data?

Clay Johnson, late of Sunlight Labs and now writing at the splendidly-named InfoVegan, says that what the “Open Data” movement needs is a better way to store data on the…

How APIs Help the Newsroom

As nice as it is to get praised for the civic-mindedness of your work, the not-so-secret secret about APIs at The Times is that we’re the biggest consumer of them. The…

Using the NYT Congress API with … Excel?

It’s true that Excel has been a decreasing part of my toolkit for several years now, and that I never quite had the love for it that I do for various database managers. But…

A Gentle Introduction to Google App Engine

As part of our roll-out of version 3 of the NYT Congress API, I was tasked with coming up with a sample application that uses the API to do something mildly interesting, or…

Lightning Talks at NICAR

This year’s computer-assisted reporting conference in Phoenix has a couple of new sessions on the schedule. One of them is an idea a couple of us have been pushing for a few…

The Gift of Data

One of the more challenging and interesting projects at work lately has been the work we’ve done on the Toxic Waters series by Charles Duhigg. Since the stories have…

The Future of IRE Training

Anyone in journalism who knows me knows how much of a debt I owe to an organization called Investigative Reporters and Editors. Sure, I liked playing with data before I…

A Question of Emphasis

The job cuts at the Washington Post on Friday have produced a round of comments, broadly summed up by Steve Yelvington earlier today. They certainly begged the question that…

Buying Into Computational Journalism

The intriguing title of a recent report from scholars at Duke is “Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism”. Semi-related to CAR…

The FEC’s Disclosure Data Catalog

The good folks at the Federal Election Commission launched a disclosure data catalog recently, continuing the federal government data catalog trend. And while there are few…

One Way to Encourage Innovation

Innovation. We’re told over and over (often by people who don’t actually do much more than talk, but that’s another story) that our industry needs it. So, you ask, how I can…

The Fundamental Training Need

It’s good to see recent writings on the importance of training and skill development for journalists.

The Case Against Teaching Access

I’ve been at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University since last week, talking to faculty members about using data management and analysis tools…

No, Really, Show Us The Data

When it first appeared I was really excited to see Show Us The Data, which gave visitors a chance to list and vote for their “Most Requested Documents” that should be more…

Represent and GeoDjango

For more details on Represent, see our post on the NYT’s Open blog.

White House Beat Feature Request

Ok, I love the fact that CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller keeps such good tabs on presidential travel, but can somebody please come up with a backup plan in case, heaven forbid…

The Difference

One of the things I try to stress to students in my computer-assisted reporting class at GW each spring is the difference between a story based largely on anecdotes or…

The Birth of Quadruplets, or Understanding the Process

My friend Dave Gulliver had a fascinating piece in his paper on Sunday about the birth of quadruplets in a Sarasota hospital. It’s a great story, but what makes it greater…

Caspio’s Lessons

Been awhile since I wrote about Caspio, and since then they’ve only gained more media clients, which I suppose could be a lesson for me. But I think not. Rather, I hope what…

The Future of News Libraries

At the recently-completed SLA conference in Seattle, Nora Paul led a session on the “future of news libraries” that asked the attendees to imagine 2012, when librarians (or…

On Bomb-Throwing

Note to visitors coming via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed: Nowhere here do I say that Curley and his team were “not effective” at WPNI. Not effective as they could have been is a…

Of the Web vs. On the Web

News organizations spend a lot of time talking about what they’re doing “on the Web,” but there’s another phrase that’s more important from a long-term perspective: “of the…

Innovation Belongs in the Newsroom

There’s quite a bit of useful discussion about the recent big moves in the social networking space and what it means, if anything, for the news industry. Steve Yelvington’s…

The Times

I originally tried to write something about this with the weightiness I felt it deserves, but it turned out to be, as a friend accurately assessed, “corny.”” So I’ll just…

Teaching Data on the Web

Matt’s advice (the latest in the series kicked off by Paul Bradshaw) is excellent: “Learn how to put data on the web.” But check out the next paragraph, where he suggests…

On Trials, Software and Otherwise

So in response to several commenters on my previous post, I went to caspio.com to see about a free 14-day trial in order to test things out. Then I read the Terms of…

Outsourcing Database Development, or the Caspio Issue

Updated: Caspio’s David Milliron responds in the comments.

Django, iCal and vObject

For one of our Django applications at work we received a request to add iCal feeds to accompany the RSS feeds available for each candidate’s page (example here). I first…

The Original (and Future?) Facebook

So the people who run newspapers are probably looking at Facebook, which is enjoying traffic growth that surely has advertisers lining up to try and get a piece of that…

The New Competition

Back when we launched the Congress Votes Database in late 2005, it had only a few contemporaries, including the excellent GovTrack. Now the field is getting pretty crowded…

Finding Enterprise Reporting

During our train ride this morning a colleague and I talked about a common problem that has some real implications: the difficulty in finding enterprise and public service…

Shoot the Google

Pieces like the one Neil Henry, formerly of the Washington Post, wrote in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, annoy me to no end. They are written by passionate, intelligent…

Why The Web

Friday was my last day as an employee of The Washington Post newspaper. As I told my newsroom colleagues, it’s sort of a ludicrous thing for me to contemplate, since I…

Congressional Vote Database

So humor me today, and the CAR stories will return tomorrow. I’d like to announce a project that Adrian Holovaty of washingtonpost.com and I started working on a few months…

Xpdf on the Mac

Last year I wrote a piece for Uplink on using Xpdf to convert PDF documents into text tables, but that piece focused on using xpdf on Win32 systems. Here’s an adapted guide…

The Long Bet

It’s Dave Winer vs. the New York Times in a bet over, well, it’s not exactly clear. Dave says it’s about “which will be authoritative,” although that’s not what the question…