I’m pleased to announce the Post-Dispatch is hiring a “Data Specialist.”

Now, we’re not looking for just any data specialist.

We need someone who can join the A-Team with guns blazing to hit the ground running and snap the necks of all unruly data vigilantes in the way. There are some humongous shoes to fill at an organization like this with a long legacy of investigative reporting and that whole “Crown Jewel of Pulitzer” thing. You’ll be following in the steps of previous data masters including Kevin Crowe (uh, this isn’t actually *the* Kevin Crowe but the impostor’s artist statement kind of puts things in perspective) and Jaimi Dowdell. You’ll be working with all sorts of folks, from Pulitzer Prize winners to odd ball nerds like me — both whom just happen to be from Northwest Ohio. (They grow them pretty awesome out there. It’s something in the water.) (Update: Uh, nevermind. Joe is leaving to go to the Chicago Tribune.) You’ll be given a lot of responsibility and freedom to do some amazing work at an organization that truly values your skill set. There’s even a HUGE office with sweet wood paneling (no joke) that can be all yours!

Here’s the ad:

The Post-Dispatch is looking for a data specialist who will join forces with reporters and editors to produce sophisticated stories and projects in print and online. This journalist must be able to balance short and long-term news projects, breaking news and sustained data projects. Knowledge of Freedom of Information laws and the proven ability to negotiate for data are essential. The ideal candidate must be versed in a variety of database managers (Excel, Access, SQL Server, FoxPro) and must be proficient in SQL. The candidate also must have a working knowledge of Perl, Python, Visual Basic, or another programming language. Familiarity with ArcView 9.X is a necessity. Knowledge of XML is also a plus, as is familiarity with VBA for Access and Excel. Besides collaboration with fellow reporters and editors, this individual will be expected to produce his or her own stories in many instances.

As a member of the projects team, the data specialist also will work regularly with the graphics department to produce materials for online and print, and will help with the online database site.

To apply, please submit a resume and six to eight stories that best show your abilities to Irvin Harrell, Director of Community Outreach and Newsroom Recruitment, at 900 N. Tucker Blvd., St. Louis, Mo., 63101. The application deadline is Oct. 30. And tell them Will sent you!

If you have any questions about the gig, the Post-Dispatch organization, St. Louis or where babies come from, feel free to shoot me an email at will [at] journerdism.com and I’ll do my best to help.

Oh yea, we’re also hiring a health care reporter (but that’s not nearly as cool).

Hey gang,
Sorry it’s been pretty quiet recently. I moved to a new place, have been busy with the day job and a few freelance gigs and I’m also writing for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits a few times a week — feel free to check that out too (or if you have tips, please feel free to send them my way). I’ll usually post a link in the Jambalaya if I report something that isn’t already here, but the jambalaya tends to run a bit more nimble than EMT, due to the editing process.

Anyway, I’m heading to Poynter this week for the “Big Ideas, Best Practices” conference this week. There’s going to be a live-blog and tons of really great info-sharing, so definitely check that out. I’ll see you when I get back and the dust settles.

Cheers,
Will

Update @ 11:30 p.m. 5.26.09 - We’re at about 78% strength now. The pages are still missing, I think I’m going to have to rebuild those from scratch. And some photos are still missing (those may be gone for good). I haven’t tested all the plugins yet, but have most of them installed and configured.

My (soon to be former) webhost, 1and1, has offered one month of free hosting (Approximately worth $9) to compensate for the week of complete down time and 30+ hours of development time resurrecting the site on my end from archives and backups. They haven’t helped with that at all.

It’s my own fault though. 1and1 had a three day outage about a year ago in the spring and after that I bought hosting from the vastly-superior and highly-recommended,  WebFaction, to make the move off 1and1 but started just using my WebFaction account as a development/learning environment.  I should have dropped 1and1 all together and avoided this disaster. Once I get this site back up to full strength I won’t make that mistake again.  

I also should have also backed up more frequently and I wouldn’t have had to go through all the Wordpress database changes from 1.9 to 2.7. (Which is where I think I lost the Pages.)

Lessons you should take from this: 1- Back up your site frequently.  2- Never, ever, ever, ever use 1and1.com for hosting.

—

Earlier - As you may have noticed the site had been completely down for a week now. 1and1.com, the hosting company, had a hardware failure and has pretty much lost my (and from what tech support told me 27 others sites) that were hosted on the same server. They’re trying to resurrect what they can but it’s not looking good.

I’m working through some of my old backups to resurrect what I can, so please excuse the database errors, missing pictures and whatnot during the transition.

Thanks for your patience and for reading Journerdism,
Will

PBS legend, Charlie Rose, has been interviewing a lot of leading media and Web execs this Spring about the future of the Internet and media. This weekend I finally got around to working my way through all thoughts from the mogul minds and I highly recommend you find time to do the same:

• A conversation about print journalism in the digital age with Arianna Huffington of Huffingtonpost.com and Tom Curley of the Associated Press

• A conversation about the future of newspapers with Walter Isaacson of “Time,” Robert Thomson of “Wall Street Journal” and Mort Zuckerman of “The New York Daily News”

• A conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. Best known as co-author of Mosaic, and founder of Netscape. He is on the Board of Directors of Facebook and eBay

• A conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

• A conversation with Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product and User Experience, Google

• A conversation with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

• A conversation with Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter.com

• A conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Amazon.com

• A conversation with Chris DeWolfe And Tom Anderson, founders of Myspace.com

While we’re at it, here are a few old but goodies from last year:

• A discussion about Google and emerging technology with Ken Auletta of The New Yorker

• A conversation with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com

• A conversation with Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine

• A conversation about Wikipedia, web technology, and the future of search with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia

A year and a half ago, Microsoft Live Labs released an interesting interactive multimedia experience called Photosynth. It’s basically a 3d-ish environment created from hundreds of photos. You can zoom in, out, view different angles and details of the photosynth environment you create. Microsoft has detailed instructions on how to shoot and create a Photosynth on their site which is very helpful.

Here’s a handful of recently produced Photosynth examples (in their publication order):

• National Geographic’s historical landmarks
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sue the T-Rex Photosynth
• CNN’s “The Moment”
• Inauguration Photosynths Mapped by Microsoft
  
• Washington Post Lincoln Memorial | Air & Space Museum | American Indian Museum

I’d been jonesin’ to try this new technology out after I saw National Geographic’s experiment with it in 2008. So at the Post-Dispatch, we created a photosynth of Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex (an exhibit at the local science center) in the beginning of 2009. Our multimedia intern, Ryan Gladstone, shot hundreds of photos of Sue at multiple angles in the Science Center and Brian Williamson, Erica Smith and Gary Hairlson helped stuff it into the Internet and skin it to our site (as well as offer an example to Mac users who can’t view Photosynths).

Having gone through the exercise now (and having seen a few others follow in our footsteps), here are some thoughts about the technology, it’s benefits and it’s limitations:

+ Innovative experience
It’s gotta be said. When this technology works, it’s really, really cool. Photosynths are a great interactive experience to explore a place/event/thing. I think anyone who saw the Blaise Aguera y Arcas Seadragon demo from TED had their mind blown. (I just watched the original demo again and I’m still excited about this idea — especially the ability to have almost inifinite zoom in visual experiences.)

- Low penetration
Unfortunately, barely anyone has the Photosynth plugin installed on their computer. So your users are going to have to download a sizable plugin to view any content you create.

- Only PC & Intel Macs
The other major, major (!) technical issue, is Photosynth is only built for PCs and Intel Macs. So straight away you wipe out a sizable chunk of your audience. I’m really not a fan of this at all, so I doubt we’ll do many more of these until that issue is fixed or until we can find a workaround/solution. It was a nice experiment but not something I’d want to subject an audience to regularly.

- Image Quality
The download time for the image quality is a bad proposition. Since Photosynths are a high-bandwidth challenge, images are compressed substantially. Part of me thinks I’d rather just have a Boston.com Big Picture experience with just huge, beautiful, sharp, clean pictures than a grainy, small, 3d-ish expereince. It’s early though, bandwidth and the compression technology will improve.

- Graying reality
Photosynths can raise ethical issues among photojournalists. Unless you are shooting an inactive object or have hundreds of cameras simultaneously set up to actuate at the same moment, you’re going to get a whole lot of ‘gray area’ for what happened at *that* moment. A good example of this is CNN’s “The Moment”, if you poke around you’ll see multiple versions of Barack, some smiling, some not, some with his hand raised, some not. So photosynths can create a blurred or grayed example of reality, which can be a bit slippery if you’re billing something as an exact moment in time.

- Navigation
As with any new technology, it can take some time to figure out the Photosynth navigation interface and how users are supposed to interact with the content. It really relies on the user to be curious and persistent. (I wouldn’t want to unleash this on any of my elders because of this.)

+ Collaborative media potential
What is also really exciting about Photosynths is the opportunity to create collaborative multimedia experiences with your audience — and imagine mixing video clips into this too!

So overall, Photosynths are interesting, but there are some large technical, navigation and software penetration issues to resolve before this becomes any sort of ‘mainstream’ multimedia expereince. It’s an exciting development though and the immersive deep-zooming technology could definitely become a fixture in our lives very soon. In some senses, the multi-touch experiences on iPhones parallel the Photosynth navigaton experience.