Mashups: A Journalist's Web Tool

Journalists nowadays can save some time doing research with clever web tools like mashups. What does a mashup site do? What kind of information can you find on them? And how is it helpful for journalists?

First I’ll tell you briefly how they work. Websites use software that goes out and “scraps” other websites for truckloads of any kind of information you can find on the Web. A good example of where content might come from would be the immeasurable amounts of data generated by government run research sites. Next that data, collected from many different sources, databases, web pages etc., is quite literally “mashed” together and archived so that users can then go in and do a simple search for particular kinds of information. This is a quicker more direct alternative to a Google search if you know what kind of info you’re looking for.

Ever wonder how active your city is politically on a national level? Okay, that’s not a simple question to answer or measure, but mashup sites are helpful in finding pieces of evidence to help journalists write a more complete story.

I visited the popular mashup site, This We Know and in about two minutes, I found out that the city of Chicago has introduced 16 bills since 1993 from 16 different members of Congress. Apparently a lot more than my hometown, San Francisco has with 10 bills introduced since 1993 from 5 members of Congress.

This We Know collects, organizes and makes freely available all information that the government collects about your community. Statemaster, another site, has a similar idea, scrapping together all information about the US organized by state. That might give you a clue to what information you can find on these sites and how they can be used by journalists.

Another useful tool to use is Datamasher, a site that actually enables users to do the mashing themselves. On their site you can visualize through interactive maps how the 50 states compare on important issues such as taxation, health, education, you get to choose.

For example here is a mashup map called "Driving Us to Drink" that was created by a user then posted on the site, comparing tax revenue per capita and alcohol consumption/binge drinking.

It’s interesting to see how mashups have contributed to political journalism. I think these sites are a very powerful tool because they equip individual people, whether they are journalists or not, to be fact-checkers.

Influential mashup site, Politifact, won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and public service for coverage of the 2008 elections. A main feature on the site are truth-o-meters displayed next to statements made by politicians indicating whether they are “true,” “mostly-true,” “barely true,” all the way to “false.” This is a new twist on journalism, but most definitely a good one.