The Poynter Institute is convening a free conference in St. Petersburg Aug. 2 and 3 that would benefit any reporter or editor whose coverage involves government or politics.
From Poynter Managing Director Butch Ward:
“New Tools For Improving Your Government Coverage” will introduce reporters, technologists and editors whose stories rely on government records to a variety of Web tools that can help you do better, deeper work – and do it faster.
A grant from the Knight Foundation will pay for all participants’ tuition and one night in a hotel.
Poynter’s Stephen Buckley and Al Tompkins will join me in leading the conference, and we have a very good lineup of presenters, which includes:
— Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, who will present tools for gathering data on your local members of Congress, including their votes, budget earmarks, campaign contributors and more.
— The creators of DocumentCloud, who will explain how you can strengthen document-driven reporting with tools for annotating, organizing and publishing those records on the Web.
— A representative of Tableau, who will describe how data visualization tools can deepen your understanding of information and produce better stories.
— Pulitzer Prize-winner Bill Dedman, who will talk about the pitfalls that tools present when we fail to apply good, old-fashioned reporting know-how to their use.
— In addition, Al Tompkins will lead a workshop that demonstrates how a variety of Web tools can aid in the reporting of complex stories.
Through it all, we will discuss how to expand the participants’ critical reporting skills — both in identifying available tools and using them effectively. This is, at its heart, a conference about how good reporting can benefit from technology — the focus will stay on the reporting.
You can get more information on registering here.
