The annual prizes recognize outstanding reporting by journalists under 35. Winners of the $10,000 prizes for local, national and international reporting will be announced June 6.

Sadly, the official announcement doesn’t include links to the entries so I’m collecting them here. I’ve started digging, but this seems like a relatively “quiet” award (unlike The Pulitzer Prizes, which get a ton of coverage).

You can help me by sending a link to the entry plus some verification (a press release or story from the outlet, for example). This year’s goal is to improve upon the list I made for the 2009 awards. Thanks for your help.

Finalists for the 2011 Livingston Awards prize

• Trevor Aaronson (@trevoraaronson), Mother Jones, “The Informants“
• Leila Atassi, The Plain Dealer, “From Night Out to Nightmare“
• Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, “God Knows Where I Am“
• Emily Cadei, Congressional Quarterly/CQ Weekly
• Cindy Carcamo (@theCindyCarcamo), Slake: Los Angeles, “Return to Sender“
• Jordan Conn (@jordanconn), The Atavist, “The Defender“
• Nicholas Deshais (@NickDeshais), The Pacific Northwest Inlander, “The Bulldog“
• Adam Ellick (@aellick), The New York Times, “Toxic Coffee in Bahrain“
• David Epstein (@SIDavidEpstein), Sports Illustrated, for a package on “pain and anticipatory skill in sports”
• Sarah Favot, Kristen Berg, Jenna Ebersole, New England Center for Investigative Reporting
• Megan Feldman (@Meg_feldman), 5280 The Denver Magazine, “What Happened to Abbey’s Mom“
• Ryan Gabrielson (@rgabrielsonCW), California Watch, for an investigation into flaws in death investigations
• Gus Garcia-Roberts (@GusGarciaHyphen), Miami New Times, “Rotten to the Core“
• Michael Garofalo, National Public Radio
• Eliza Gray, The New Republic
• Chris Hamby (@ChrisDHamby), iWatch News, for the three-part series, “Model Workplaces, Imperiled Workers“
• Melissa Harris, Julie Wernau, Chicago Tribune
• Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times
• Elizabeth Herman, Mohannad Sabry, Omnia Al Desoukie, Deena Adel, Matthew Negrin, Kristin Deasy, Lauren Bohn, GlobalPost
• Blake Hounshell, Foreign Policy
• Kelly House, The Oregonian
• Julia Ioffe, The New Yorker
• Michael LaForgia (@laforgia_), The Palm Beach Post, for the three-part series, “Drugging Delinquents“
• A.J. Lagoe (@ajinvestigates), WRIC-TV 8 (VA), for investigative reporting on black market babies and the push for adoptees to receive access to their birth records
• Amber Elizabeth Lyon, CNN
• Brittany Lyte (@blyte), Connecticut Post, for investigative reporting on toxic dumping
• Andrew McLemore, The Williamson County Sun (TX)
• Chris Megerian (@ChrisMegerian), The Star-Ledger, for an investigation into an alleged cover-up of a drunk driving collision involving a state police trooper
• Ben Montgomery (@gangrey), Tampa Bay Times, “Spectacle: The lynching of Claude Neal“
• Eric Moskowitz (@GlobeMoskowitz, The Boston Globe, “Little noted or known, they bear scars of that day“
• Stephanie Paige Ogburn, High Country News (CO)
• Olga Pierce (@olgapierce), Jeff Larson (@thejefflarson), Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett), ProPublica, for their investigative reporting on redistricting
• Ben Poston (@bposton), The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for investigative reporting on police traffic stops and response times
• Corinne Reilly (@CorinneReilly), The Virginian-Pilot, “A Chance in Hell“
• Nathaniel Rich, Harper’s, “The Luckiest Woman on Earth: Three ways to win the lottery” (Subscription required)
• Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy
• Robert Sanchez (@MileHighRobert), 5280 The Denver Magazine, “Rewrite“
• Eli Saslow, The Washington Post
• Mattathias Schwartz, The New Yorker, “A Massacre in Jamaica“
• Amy Silverstein (@amysiltein), Mother Jones, “Is Susan G. Komen Denying the BPA-Breast Cancer Link?“
• Kelley Weiss, California Watch

Ben gave this talk at NICAR in St. Louis earlier this year. Lucky for us, ISOJ streamed it, and La Nacion’s data team captured it.

Watch, learn, and dig deeper in Ben’s Delicious stack. Ben also writes terrific material on his site, Palewire and tweets at @palewire.

It was so popular, in fact, that people have asked me to make a similar collection again. So from Feb. 23–26, I’ll be updating this post with all the great things NICARians have to share this year.

Follow #NICAR12 on Twitter for the buzz; come to this page for the goods. And if you’re attending the conference, be sure to buy a T-shirt to support IRE, the organization that puts this fantastic event together. Ben Welsh of The Los Angeles Times is taking candid photos and posting them on Flickr.

Have links from sessions you attended? Post them in comments or ping me on Twitter @MacDiva and I’ll add them to this list.

Jump to Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
 

Presentations & Tutorials

• Bringing Maps to Fruition (from Michelle Minkoff)
• Free tools for scraping data without programming (from Chris Keller and Michelle Minkoff)
• Instructions for Hands-on Web Scraping Without Programming (from Chris Keller and Michelle Minkoff)
• Locating the Story: The Latest in Online Maps and mapping links (from Ben Welsh)
• Mapping links & presentation (from David Herzog)
• Social Media Sleuthing (from Doug Haddix)
• freeDive Tips & Tricks (from the Knight Digital Media Center)
• CAR on a Shoestring (from Kevin Crowe, Patrick Sweet and Mary Jo Webster)
• Regular Expressions: An Introduction (from Kevin Crowe, Patrick Sweet and Mary Jo Webster)
• Create a moderation form using Google Forms and Fusion Tables
• Scraping with Django (from Kevin Schaul)
• How to turn PDFs into a searchable, sortable table (from Kevin Schaul)
• Get the Most Out of Fusion Tables (from Rebecca Shapley)
• Data viz in 20 minutes: jQuery DataTables (from Christopher Schnaars)
• How to set up Python in Windows 7 (from Anthony DeBarros)
• Data visualization best practices (from Kat Downs)
• NodeXL for Network analysis (from Peter Aldhous)
• Network Analysis for News (from Peter Aldhous and Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe)
• Network analysis for news (video of Peter Aldhous’s NICAR12 talk)
• How to Use Google Refine for Investigative Journalism (from Dan Nguyen)
• Mapping is for Everyone – How to make all kinds of maps (from Sharon Machlis)
• Advanced Excel techniques tipsheet (from MaryJo Webster)
• How do you edit a story made of software? (from Alexander Howard)
• Election Night Results & Maps (from John Keefe)
• Covering Elections presentation (from Al Shaw)
• Making friends with map projections (from Ben Welsh and Michael Corey)
• Database validation (from JT Johnson)
• Web scraping with Node.js (from Al Shaw)
• Who is John Doe — and where to get the paper on him
• Practical TastyPie for the Modern Djangonaut (from Jeremy Bowers)
• Weathering the Storm: Using data to bolster the traditional weather story (from Stephen Stirling)
• Build your first Django news app (from the IRE NICAR12 Django workshop)
• GeoCommons walkthrough (from Paul Monies)
• QGIS 1 workshop tutorial (from Michael Corey)
• Tell Me a Story! – storytelling and data journalism (from Anthony DeBarros)
• Human-assisted reporting: How to create robot reporters in your own image (from Ben Welsh)
• How I learned to stop worrying and love flat files (from Ben Welsh)
• Infect the CMS (from Jacob Harris)
• Inspect the Web With Your Browser’s Web Inspector (from Dan Nguyen)
• An Intro to R (from Jacob Fenton)
• Slides from “Mapping is Hard” (from Brian Boyer)
• TileMill hands-on tutorial (from Chris Amico, Brian Boyer and Matt Stiles)
• Own Your Map Stack (from Chris Amico, Brian Boyer and Matt Stiles)
• Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) basics (from Cid Standifer)
• Connecting to state data using OpenMissouri.org (from David Herzog)
• How to convert PDFs to Excel in Windows (from IRE)
• Quantum GIS (QGIS) 2 workshop (from Michael Corey)
• How to turn PDFs into text (from Dan Nguyen)
• Web scraping in Python workshop tutorial (from Mark Ng)
• Infiltrate the Ad Department (from Ryan Pitts)
• Map Graphics for Video (from Michael Corey)
• What We Can Find Out from Elections (from Aaron Bycoffe)
• The Latest in Mapping with Javascript and jQuery (from Timothy Barmann)
• How to Make a PANDA (from Brian Boyer)
• The Farenthold Surprise (election panel presentation from Derek Willis)
• Displaying data geographically: Creating a one-layer map in ArcMap (from Tom Meagher)
• An intro to csvKit (from Christopher Groskopf and Anthony DeBarros)
• Integrating CAR into a daily Beat (from Kate Martin)
• How to use the SIMILE Exhibit timeline framework (from David Karger)
• Tableau training handouts (from Tableau)
• CAR Training 2012 including mapping data sets, practice data sets and tip sheets (from Jennifer LaFleur)

Jump to Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
 

Software & Tools

• Twazzup – find breaking news, popular hashtags, influential users
• Reporters’ Lab Reviews – a link list of tools, techniques and research for public affairs reporting
• Twellow – a yellow pages for Twitter
• Twiangulate – find sources and groups of people on Twitter
• Crowdbooster – monitor and analyze buzz on social media sites
• KnowEm Username Search – finds the social networks a person or organization/brand is using
• Muckrack Pro – add yourself to the list of journalists or find journalists covering a particular topic
• The Archivist – save tweets and export to Excel to analyze later
• PowerPivot for Excel – “Load massive amounts of data from virtually any source, process in seconds and model with powerful analytical capabilities”
• Pandoc – a universal document converter
• HTML-to-PDF – converts HTML to PDF docs for free
• Mr. Data Converter – converts Excel data into one of several Web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.
• Natural Language Toolkit – for machine language text analysis
• Voyant Tools – Web-based document analysis
• ClearForest Gnosis – Firefox plugin that uses OpenCalais for data extraction
• Exhibit – a publishing framework for data-rich interactive web pages
• DocumentCloud – store, analyze and annotate PDFs
• DataTables – jQuery plugin to create sortable datasets
• Ben Welsh’s triumvirate of tools that allow you to copy Google Maps’ functionality:
   - a data source, like OpenStreetMap
   - a tile set, like what you can make with TileMill
   - a JavaScript interface, like Leaflet
• OpenOffice – open source office suite software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation/slide deck, database)
• QGIS – Open source geographic information system
• Shape to Fusion (a.k.a. Shpescape) – Import shapefiles to Fusion Tables
• MySQL – Database software
• Google Refine – data cleaner
• Junar – Discover and track data
• The Overview Project
• Visicheck – ensures your graphics are visible to the colorblind
• Colorbrewer – in case you need help with color schemes for your design
• Color Oracle – colorblindness simulator for Mac OS, Windows and Linux
• 0 to 255 – find variations of any color
• Beautiful Soup – useful for many things, including parsing HTML
• Weave – Web-based analysis and visualization environment. Made by a partnership between the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Open Indicators Consortium
• Highcharts – create interactive JavaScript charts (free for non-commercial use)
• Indiemapper – Upload shapefiles and convert them to create static, thematic maps
• CSV-to-JSON converter
• Sinatra a lightweight Ruby/Rails framework for creating apps
• Use Google Docs, XPath and the =importxml() function to put data in a spreadsheet
• PANDA Project
• Timemap syncs a SIMILE timeline to a web-based map
• Tabletop – allows you to use Google spreadsheets as your app backend
• Js2Coffee – converts Javascript to CoffeeScript and back
• CoffeeScript sandbox
• iPL2 – ask a librarian, search through the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) websites.
• “Lesson of the night: Want to put census geos in fusion tables? Keep it stupid simple: convert US Census data from TIGER into shape files with shpescape” — tip from Matt Kiefer
• Rubular – a Ruby regular expression editor
• Timeline Setter – makes timelines from spreadsheets
• Spoofcard changes your voice and gives you a temporary phone number
• Tablechart turns HTML tables into charts
• Spam Mimic – hide a message in spam
• FEC scraper/FEC parser – Chris Schnaars’ script on Github

Jump to Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
 

References

• The American Library Association’s wiki of government databases (from Dan Nguyen)
• Penn Treebank Project reference – Use it in conjunction with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)
• Geomedia Google Group
• NICAR-L mailing list
• Google Public Data Explorer
• InfoVis Wiki – a catchcall list of papers, conferences, patterns and jobs in information visualization
• Spatial Reference – an IMDB-like catalog of spatial reference systems
• 22 free visualization tools collected by ComputerWorld
• Free Data Visualization tools – a collection from Sharon Machlis
• 8 cool tools for data analysis, visualization and presentation (from Sharon Machlis)
• Chart and image gallery: 30 free tools for data visualization and analysis (from Sharon Machlis)
• LocalHealthData.org – find health data from more than 70 sources and 300+ datasets
• Analytic Journalism “It’s not ‘all about story’ if you don’t have anything to say.”
• How to install MySQL and Navicat on Windows
• Freebase – an entity graph/Wikipedia-like collection of data
• Save the Post Office – records U.S. post office consolidations and closures
• Los Angeles Times datadesk Github repository with code for you to use
• USASpending.gov – Official record of Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (Transparency Act)
&bull: Data for the Public Good by Alexander Howard (free eBook)
• CongressionalPrimaries.org shows what Illinois congressional candidates are tweeting about
• Civic Commons Marketplace collects open government efforts in the U.S.
• OpenCorporates is in the process of collecting information on every corporate entity in the world
• USA Today’s Developer Network

Jump to Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
 

Work Samples

• Bailed out banks profit from tax liens (Arizona Star heat maps showed property locations, making the story very clear)
• Race gap found in traffic stops (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel showed the racial disparity in pullovers and on further examination, municipal maintenance requests)
• Texas redistricting map and slider code (Texas Tribune)
• The Poverty Gap shows a clear correlation between poverty and access to education (ProPublica)
• 2012 Election Results big board, one approach to visual presentation of election info that tells you the story of the election immediately (The New York Times)
• Little Loving County grabs a bit of Texas’ growth a census story unlike the usual census stories (The Dallas Morning News)
• Riot rumours: how misinformation spread on Twitter during a time of crisis uses data analysis to watch the spread and suppression of rumors about the London riots (The Guardian)
• Discover Boston Public Schools (Code for America)
• SchoolBook makes teacher data reports for New York City schools
• Redistricting: New lines leave some voters without a senator (The [Riverside, Calif.] Press-Enterprise)

Jump to Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples

And finally, no journalism nerdfest would be complete without a demonstration of the latest hotness: Drone journalism by Matt Waite.

Drone Journalism Demo – Matt Waite from John Keefe on Vimeo.

If you want to understand someone, my advice is to sit next to them and solve a very hard problem together. You will learn who they are by watching how they think.
— Michael Lopp

PyGotham and the Q&A that followed, I’m finding more reasons than ever to read Michael Lopp’s books and blog, Rands in Repose.

The tension between those who make digital products and those who don’t is a systemic problem that seems to stymie every industry, yet so few people know how to resolve it — and resolve it at scale. There must be a collection of good advice somewhere. If not, it’s probably time to start one. What do you say?

(Photo: Ed Yourdon/Flickr)

It’s a wide-ranging talk about what’s new and inspiring about news technology, and how each team member’s unique skills contribute to the whole.

Well worth watching. And if you want to deeply nerd out with The Guardian, check out their Developer Blog.

The projects mentioned in Alastair’s talk:

• Twitter replay of the England vs. USA World Cup match (requires Flash)
• An interactive map showing the incidents recorded in the military’s Afghan war logs, using documents released by Wikileaks
• A tool that allows you to examine and build your own government budget
• An atlas of public spending
• A visualization of three days of public reaction on Twitter to events surrounding the phone hacking scandal.

Alastair’s team is Martin Shuttleworth, Mariana Santos, Jonathan Richards and Alex Graul.

Note, this is one person’s perspective. Nevertheless, her response is a really important read. For some time now, I’ve been studying how to increase the number of women in tech and as I see it, the hurdles are three: Culture. Education. Mentorship/Role Models.

Of the three, example after example shows culture is the hardest to overcome. Cox illuminates what tech culture is like — and offers valuable advice on how a woman can use perspective to her advantage.

It’s my hope that tech culture will evolve in a way that doesn’t require a hard shell to stay in and excel.

But until then, people who don’t feel like alpha nerds but want to be in tech can learn a lot from Rebekah Cox’s reply and footnotes. Read it and leap.

Being able to read API docs is like being able to read any foreign language: You improve through daily practice. So for today, let’s stick with movie reviews.

I hope you’ve got a Netflix account. If so, work through Joseph Smarr’s Netflix API tutorial. When you’re done, you’ll have a personalized list of RSS reader-ready movie ratings, reviews, and recent DVD returns.

If you’ve got questions as you’re working through the tutorial, post them in comments and try to help each other. I’ll pitch in too. Afterward, you’ll be ready for something completely different, so we’ll take a look at the Bitly API on Wednesday.

If you need a little break while you’re working through the Netflix example, enjoy the fascinating video below that explains the Stuxnet computer virus. This kinetic type explainer was created for Australia’s “Hungry Beast” news show on ABC1.

Video: Patrick Clair/Vimeo

It’s directed at readers with little to no coding experience. I hope the intended audience finds it helpful. The example I used — looking up New York Times “Harry Potter” movie reviews — was a fun one, rather than something more serious, because doing fun things lowers the barrier to getting started.

Reading API documentation takes patience and tenacity. Even the most experienced developers I know will sometimes come across documentation so poor that they spend a lot of time guessing at how the API works. So don’t feel daunted. Practice instead.

I’ll post a couple follow-up exercises here on Ricochet, but get started now by heading over to the beginner’s guide for journalists who want to understand API documentation.

Update:
Thanks for all the retweets, comments and link pass-alongs. Keep them coming, and feel free to ask questions and suggest other tutorial topics in the space below.

Michal Migurski of Stamen sent me some thoughts about writing APIs based on my post, which makes me think there might be hope for the way API documentation will be written in the future.

In the meantime, if you’re responsible for writing API docs — or technical documentation of any sort — Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Writing Great Documentation” instructional series is mandatory reading.

Jacob’s name might sound familiar to you: he’s one of the co-founders of Django, a Web development framework created by journalists and developers as a tool for doing data-based journalism.

Photo: Sean Dreilinger/Flickr

I think that’s why people like hackathons. This year, I’m cohosting Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11, a hack day in Boston on Sept. 22, the day before the start of the Online News Association conference. You’re invited to join 100 like-minded makers of all stripes by signing up now. It’s $20 — a small price to pay for what you’ll get out of it.

September is a long way off, which means there’s lots of time for pre-hackathon planning and collaboration. Whether or not you’ve participated in a hackathon before (and if you haven’t, here’s why you should), you can help make the period from the signup announcement up to day of event a productive and collaborative one.

Post your suggestions for bringing any hackathon community together online at the Hackathon Runway EtherPad instance, or feel free to leave your thoughts in comments below.

Things I’ve been thinking about:

• What’s the most effective way to collaborate?
• How can non-coders play an active role?
• What tools (software, SDKs, repos, APIs, apps) have you used?
• How can the hacks made be incorporated into everyday use?

Your ideas and feedback are always appreciated.

By the way, I’m here at the MIT Knight Civic Media Conference, one of the most exciting annual gatherings for people interested in gathering, organizing and disseminating public information. It’s the highlight of the Knight News Challenge, and showcases some of the most motivated and dedicated thinkers and doers in the field. Sixteen proposals were funded this year, and they’re the most wide-ranging and potentially impactful yet.

If you’re here, say hi and be sure to come to my 2:30 p.m. unconference session today on building pre-hackathon community. I’ll be there with Matt Carroll of the Boston Globe and Phillip Smith of the Mozilla Foundation.

If you’d like to see other tutorials, let me know what you’re looking for.