Hardly feels like it’s been almost a year, but I guess a mild winter will do that to you.

It’s not that there aren’t obvious differences: Westchester happens to be a suburb of New York City. Panola County is in the middle of East Texas nowhere. On East Texas radio, you hear mostly country music. In Westchester, it seems they really, really, really like Prince. Prince of the “Little Red Corvette” and “Raspberry Beret” era. One is suburb, the other rural.

But they both have cities (or in Westchester’s case, villages) that are small. I grew up in Carthage, which had a population of 6,660 at the time. Irvington, one of the villages I cover, has a population around 6,000 as well.

I’ve been trying to describe how this could be, but the only thing I seem to be able to put together is that Panola is much less dense than Westchester. Everything’s spaced out and wider.

That doesn’t really hit you until you look at Census numbers. So thanks to a really interesting infographic tool (Creately) and the fabulous Census Bureau (every journalist’s best friend), I made an infographic comparing population and area size. Yes, this does solidify my nerd status:

Next up: a look at municipalities and New York’s quad-municipality system.

There are some differences between working for a community news site as opposed to a metropolitan newspaper. For example, a new school playground wouldn’t make The Dallas Morning News or The New York Times front page. But it does where I work (and actually, that was a pretty fun story to write).

But data visualization can work for both small and large news outlets. There’s just a difference in the scope of data used. The Texas Tribune highlights public salaries across the state in its popular database.

How do I incorporate visualizations into my stories (when I can find an angle)?

Well, how about a story about a sex offender moving to an apartment building across the street from a local elementary school?

Or these stories looking into Revolutionary War history in the Tarrytowns area (I live in an area where they fought in the Revolutionary War now. Yes, I did get slightly weirded out when I realized that).

This past week, I created a map for the annual village-wide tag sale in Tarrytown.

Data visualizations can be used in a variety of stories. I only wish MSC’s CMS was able to embed the maps I made (I’ve asked and it doesn’t look good that it’ll happen in the future… don’t ask me why).

Matt Stiles introduced me to Google Fusion when he stopped by my Technology Reporting class last year. I used Google Fusion in the examples above. Seeing those little red dots on a map… it’s addictive.

You can too, because it’s super easy to get Google to plot your data. All you need is a spreadsheet with one column for “Location.” Put in a street address and you’re ready to go!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can put photos into a Google Fusion map. I tried with that sex offender story, but no luck. All I ended up with was a downloads photo full of creepy mugshots.

I have to extend my apologies for not updating this site in so long. I’ve been adjusting to a move to New York and a new job. Both are wonderful, and I really should get around to posting some pictures and stuff…

Tips for a Kick-ass Newsroom:

No. 1: Title name said.

This is the eleventh commandment. Thou shalt always style it “title name said,” unless the title is too ridiculous. Then, God commandth thou shalt style it “name, title, said.” Obey or someone will smite you.

No. 2: Too many exclamation points is a sign of a diseased mind.

You only get five in your whole journalism career. Use sparingly.

No. 3: Never start with a quote.

You can only start with a quote twice in your career. Once when you’re starting out. Once when the Pope says “Fuck!”  (You can also use an exclamation point here).

No. 4: Be a homeless person.

The homeless are not afraid to approach a random person for money. You should not be afraid to approach a random person for an interview. By random we mean someone who is not a friend and is not in the journalism division.

No. 5: If you can’t get someone to talk on the record, find someone else who will.

Unless we are talking Watergate, no one likes anonymous sources. You not only look lazy, but the story is less credible.

No. 6: Make sure you are about the news, not the news tools.

Bells and whistles mean nothing unless you have the reporting to back it up.

No. 7: Always consider your average physics major.

The average physics major reads our paper to get SMU news. He prefers investigative, hard news to random event coverage such as the SAE cookout.

No. 8: “Everything goes except investigative journalism.”

If you have a limited staff, cut the fluff before you cut hard news. Your readers will thank you.

No. 9: Our philosophy is: The Daily Campus is more important than school. 

If Turner dies, don’t go to class. If Dallas Hall is burning, be there. With a notebook and flip camera. You can get notes for class. You can’t get notes on breaking news.

No. 10: Kick-ass, take names, double-check the spelling.

Self-explanatory. If you don’t get it, get the fuck outta my newsroom.

Plus, this is really funny:

I am a high school band legend.

That’s what I’ve gleamed from a conversation with Matthew, my cousin while we sit in my grandmother’s kitchen and watch the Thanksgiving lunch preparations.

“My band director told us about a girl whose pants fell down while she was marching,” he told me.

I’m not exactly sure how we came to discuss this, but I do remember sitting up straight in my chair and asking excitedly, “Did he say where she was from?” “No,” Matthew replied. He was somewhat perplexed. “That’s me,” I said. “That totally happened to me.”

Added for some visual interest. This is not my school; our uniforms were much more hideous. Via @rkleine on Flickr.

I was a freshman at Carthage High School, and I played the clarinet in our school’s band. We weren’t the kind of marching band that you might see on TV: the somewhat hip band, playing current songs and dancing around while we happened to be in formation. For us, it was all military, all the time. Precision ruled the day.

The pants incident happened at our first home football game. This being Carthage, where most everything closed at 9 p.m. and football was a revered sport, the stadium was packed with a couple thousand people. The band had been playing throughout the first half, but now we were on the field, preparing to do the familiar routine we’d been doing at practice and away games.

I noticed that the Velcro on my hideous band uniform wasn’t clinging to itself as it should. I tried smashing it back together, but that Velcro had pretty much given up. I was perhaps the 20^th person to have been assigned those pants because they hadn’t had new uniforms since the 70s. I decided it’d be ok. These pants had been doing just fine so far. So I got in formation with my clarinet and waited for the drum major’s shrill whistle, which would signal that we should begin.

I don’t recall the song we were playing or most of the steps of our routine. We started out at the back of the middle field and marched toward the home side of the stadium. We then took a turn and marched to the right, toward the field goal post. Once there, each row would do a 180-degree countermarch.

My pants started to slip just before I did the countermarch. By the time I did and had gone a few more steps, I was waddling around like a penguin.

Eventually I toppled over, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t march with your pants around your ankles.

My fellow marchers were either too shocked to say something or too unaware. Those few who could say something urged me to run off the field, but I knew that wasn’t an option. One, my embarrassment would increase triple fold, and two, all I could picture was my band director’s disapproving face as he cried out “Why did you leave the field?!”

So I did the only thing I could think of: I yanked off my pants (I did have on pants underneath my uniform, by the way), threw them over my shoulder, grabbed my clarinet, and raced toward the rest of the band at the other end of the field, hoping like hell that I’d have a clue as to where we were in our routine.

When I reached them, I found my empty hole and did two quick maneuvers back into my place. I can’t recall what the turns I did were called, but I remember it was the only time in my pitiful marching career that I did them perfectly. Luckily, we were at the end of our routine.

I got to relive the entire thing the following Monday, when we watched the video of our performance as usual. I’m sad to note that I didn’t get a copy of it. I kind of wanted to send it to America’s Funniest Home Video.

Instead, I’m the reason why my high school band made sure to require suspenders for everyone during the follow year, and I’m the reason why they made sure when they ordered new band uniforms that they came with the suspenders attached the year after that.

Allan Sloan offers career advice to journalists at the 2011 SABEW conference during his afternoon session. Photo from the Reynolds Center's Flickr (@bizjournalism).

Greetings once again, fellow #sabew11 conference attendees. Today the conference kicked off in high gear, meaning that we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

Along with some great, knowledge-packed general sessions, #sabew11 featured two major keynote addresses from SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro and Assistant to the President Elizabeth Warren. Non-business journalists shouldn’t fret; there’s stuff in here that they can use as well.

Did I miss something? Leave a comment and let me know.

Day Two Sessions

Early Bird Session: How Social Media Can Make You a Better Journalist

They didn’t call it the “Early Bird Session” for nothing.

One of my journalism professors here at SMU, Jake Batsell, got up to give a 7 a.m. session with ThomsonReuters personal finance editor Lauren Young and MSNBC.com executive business editor Marty Wolk about social media.

Find SMU journalism students Samantha Cangelosi and Natalie Posgate’s live-blog here.

You can download Batsell’s presentation here.

Find a curation of tweets from the session here.

—

Opening Keynote: Mary Schapiro, SEC Chairman

Specific outlets: Bloomberg, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Some random articles I found here and here.

Here’s a curation of tweets.

—

Keynote — Richard Fisher, president of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Here’s a copy of Fisher’s address.

Here’s a curation of tweets.

Here’s a video from The Daily Mustang. More video.

Here’s the Daily Mustang story.

More coverage here and here.

—

Up in the Air: The Future of U.S. Airlines; CEOs Gary Kelly and Gerard Arpey

Here’s a live-blog from The Daily Mustang.

Here’s a curation of tweets.

Here’s the Reynolds Center’s coverage.

Here’s The Daily Mustang coverage.

Here’s reaction to the session.

More coverage here and here.

—

Luncheon Keynote — Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesepeake Energy

Here’s a curation of tweets.

Here’s The Daily Mustang coverage.

More coverage here.

—

Reynolds Center: “How to Launch You.com – Build Your Personal Website.”

A compilation of tweets.

Here’s the Reynolds Center’s coverage.

@jeremycaplan‘s guide to building your website: bit.ly/launchyoursite

Meghan Riney (left) of Advocate Magazine and Keri Mitchell of Advocate Publishing listen to Professor Steve Doig of Arizona State. They attended the Reynolds Center's workshop on Mining the Census for Local Business Stories before the SABEW Conference at SMU in Dallas. Photo via The Reynolds Center's Flickr (@bizjournalism).

The 2011 Society of American Business Editors & Writers’ (SABEW) annual conference is being hosted at SMU this year.

As a student in Jake Batsell’s Technology Reporting class, we’re required to cover aspects of the conference. While our coverage is being hosted on The Daily Mustang, I thought I’d curate coverage from around the web as this stuff doesn’t just apply to business journalists. Much of the conference can be useful to journalists throughout the field.

The official SABEW conference hashtag is  #sabew11, although early tweets also used #sabew and #bizj. Tweeters have sort of officially adopted #sabew11 after the early confusion, which is useful to keep in mind.

Day One Sessions

Mining the Census for Local Business Stories

Data, data, data and not a clue how to deal with it. I think that’s a problem that many of us have.

Here’s the Reynolds Center’s post on the “Mining the Census” session (and yes, that’s a photo of me taking notes)

I’ve got my own story on the first part of this session, although I had to leave early to attend class. That story was done through Storify, so you’ll find all live-tweeting from that session included.

And if you missed the session and wished you’d hadn’t, check out THIS TOTALLY AWESOME LINK. The Reynolds Center has audio and PowerPoint presentations for the whole thing.

Quick Links:

An Overview of Every Statistic The U.S. Government Gathers

American Factfinder (find any and all Census data at this site, which will soon replace the original site)

IPUMS.org (another great data site, according to Steve Doig)

—

Google for Journalists: Can You Search Better?

Are you googling to your full potential? Probably not, unless you work at Google. But have no fear! Google’s Sean Carlson led a panel which aimed to teach tricks for better searching.

Katie Simon, a SMU journalism student and Daily Campus copy editor, live-blogged the “Google for Journalists” session.

Fellow journalism student LaKeisha James wrote about the Google session here.

Here’s a round-up of live-tweeting from the session, curated through Storify (which itself is an awesome tool).

Quick Links:

Google Government Search (when you want to search a government site, but don’t know which one)

Google Scholar (search academic texts)

Google Translate (translate texts or entire websites)

Google Trends (what’s being searched for right now?)

Google Insights for Search (how many people have searched for this over time?)

Google Maps (need a map to go with your story?)

Unrelated, But Still Useful Link on How to Become a Search Ninja

—

Keynote: Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management, Google

It’s the Future of Journalism speech time, folks. Mohan says the future of newspaper publishing will be display advertising.

Take another look at Katie Simon’s live-blog, as she combined both Google sessions into one chat.

SMU j-schooler Tia Gannon has a story on Mohan’s keynote address.

Here’s a report from SmartBlog on Leadership.

Here’s a curation of tweets from the keynote.

—

Opening Reception at the Meadows Museum, SMU Campus

Here’s a curation of tweets, which is currently all that’s been found on the reception.

After the Explosion

Every time I turn on my parents’ gas stove, I think about New London.

This isn’t too surprising.

After all, I grew up about 45 minutes from the small Texas town with the tragic past. I also lived in a town that made its fortune on oil and gas exploration.

My high school newspaper nearly always featured a full page ad from Devon Energy about the dangers of hanging around well sites and pipelines.

My father also had a tendency to forget to turn off the gas when he was cooking, which always lead to many jokes about how he kept trying to blow the house up.

During my senior year of high school, the school was evacuated and closed for four days because of a gas leak.

New London’s been pretty much burned into my brain at this point. I’m a one-woman gas safety machine. With this in mind, I made the trip westward for my first look at the actual town (I know what you’re thinking: it took you this long to go see it? Yes).

If you’re not familiar with the story of New London, let me explain: It was on March 18, 1937 that a gas leak caused the junior-senior high school in New London, Texas, to explode. That explosion, along with the subsequent falling rubble, killed approximately 300 students and teachers.

Students had been complaining of headaches for days. They didn’t know there was a gas leak, you see, because gas at the time didn’t have that distinctive smell. The entire reason gas smells the way it does is because of New London. Legislation was enacted quickly to make sure something like this never happened again.

After the explosion happened, the entire town came to dig the children out of the school. The force of the explosion was felt miles away.

Many others came from out of town to help, including my great-grandfather (unfortunately, my grandmother couldn’t recall much from that time because she was too little).

Today, New London is still a small town. They had rebuilt their high school practically on top of the old one, but now it’s part of Rusk ISD. There’s a memorial of the tragedy in front of West Rusk High School, and the museum is across the street.

West Rusk High School

It’s a weird experience because the high school is still operational (much like Central High School in Little Rock). You’re pretty much in the town’s center, and you’re remembering all of this destruction and death.

I wonder what it’s like for the West Rusk High students. How involved do their teachers get in retelling what happened? Are they like Washington D.C. kids, who seem to go on endless tours of the White House?

Probably. I bet they’ve all been to the museum across the street. I would have joined their ranks too, but I did not have cash (they don’t accept credit or debit cards, so beware fellow travelers!).

But I did the next best thing: I stopped by the cemetery where many who died in the New London explosion are buried. Also buried at Pleasant Hill Cemetery? Some citizens of the Republic of Texas and Captain John Smith—a guy who was at San Jacinto when Santa Anna surrendered.

All in all, it was a day chocked full of Texas History.

Additional Historical Site Near New London You’ll Want to See If You’ve Got the Time:

The site of the first oil producer in East Texas (it discovered the gigantic oil field that lay underneath): The Daisy Bradford No. 3.

This is a secluded marker on the way back to Henderson. You’ll find a sign indicating there’s a marker on the road to the right. Follow it and keep your eyes peeled on the righthand side about half a mile down the road.

You’ll be in the middle of nowhere, but the “Discovery Well” is well worth the detour.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow

My first destination in this Greatest Texas Road Trip: a non-existant house on a small street south of the Trinity River.

If ever there was a classic story of American Outlaws during the Great Depression, surely it’s Bonnie and Clyde. Robbery! Murder! Lovers on the Run!

It had been a while since I revisted their story, so I figured I’d make the house where they met the first stop on this pseudo-road trip (because what road trip includes stopping for class and work?).

From Texas Monthly:

When the boys came in, Parker was in the kitchen making hot chocolate. By all accounts, the pair, who would go on to become the most infamous outlaw lovers the world has ever known, were immediately smitten.

Their meeting took place in January 1930 on Herbert Street. But! The house where they met is no longer standing.

Texas Monthly had warned us road-trippers about the fact that many of their spots were no longer there. I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. But I learned otherwise when I tried to find this historical spot last Saturday.

It took a while to find the small street, which is nestled in a quiet neighborhood full of small houses that were mostly built in the late ’40s and early ’50s. I don’t usually frequent the area, and the southern end of the Continental Avenue Bridge was under construction, meaning I got to take a lovely detour and explore the area a bit.

In 1930, this area was probably inhabited by whites. Now, it’s mostly Hispanic. Businesses and signs were all in Spanish.

I drove up and down Herbert street, but I could not see the “few pilings for the pier and beam foundation.” Or perhaps I did, but just didn’t realize it. That’s the thing about history: sometimes it’s hard to spot (unless you’re on a Dallas Historical Society tour, wherein they point everything out to you). Much has changed since the 1930s, for example the street numbers are in the 1000s, not 100s. In addition to the neighborhood, there are industrial buildings and a gas station.

I’m glad Dallas has progressed since the 1930s, but I do wish they had made it easier to find this house. Can we put up a historical marker?