Chris Amico's Page

A week ago, I opened up Tools for News, my Django-powered database of software and web applications journalists* can use to make our lives easier and do our jobs better.

The site is pretty simple (and if I can make it more so, I will): Browse through the categories and look for what you're trying to do. Find what you need. Go use it. If you get stuck on the site looking for something and can't find it, I did something wrong (… Continue

I've been pouring over government budgets today, trying to find something interesting in the California Department of Justice outlays in the May Revise. Thrilling stuff.

Part of what makes this so mind-numbing is the way information is packaged. Nearly everything is in PDFs. So when I'm trying to crunch numbers, the fastest way I found to do it is

1. Copy and paste a long list of line items into a plain text editor


2. manually turn that into a CSV, using find/replace to cut out comm

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I was at the Future of Newsrooms panel in Berkeley the other night and noticed a couple other people from this group in the audience. Love to hear reactions from anyone else who went.

Here's the description:

Everyone is talking about the future of the newsroom in this new digital world where young people get their news from YouTube and Facebook, and traditional print journalists have seen hundreds of their breth

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Cross-posted in part from Eyes East

This might sound odd coming from someone learning Django, but bear with me. Kevin Anderson of Strange Attractor posed an interesting question the other day:

I hav

… Continue