Every crime in your neighborhood--on the web

Have you seen www.chicagocrime.org? It’s a map that uses up-to-the-minute
Citizen ICAM data from the Chicago Police Department to track the location
and nature of every reported crime in the city. When we viewed it at our
office, everyone was astounded at how much crime is happening in our home
neighborhoods.

Beyond the fear factor, it’s useful to nonprofits looking
to track the nature and number of crimes occurring in their service areas.
In areas served by the Chicago Journal newspaper, you can also get stories
about the crimes that come from the paper’s Police Blotter feature.

It’s a project of Adrian Holovaty, 25, who is in charge of special online
projects for The Washington Post. He is based in Chicago (at least until
his wife finishes law school next year).

Holovaty says he is a journalist “but I use code instead of words.” As he
points out, he is still carrying out the basic functions of journalism:
gathering information, distilling it, and presenting it. But the
information he presents relies on massive databases; he writes computer
programs that go find this information on the Web, aggregate and make sense
of it, and then make it searchable and sortable by various fields.

For example, a recent Post project was to create a searchable database of
every Congressional vote since 1991. The votes are viewable by bill, member
of Congress, year, and so forth. Chicagocrime.org, which won a prize for
journalistic innovation from University of Maryland last year, is a side
project for Holovaty.

Currently the Post has him working on a database of soldiers who have been
killed in Iraq; His next side project will rock Chicago (but I’m sworn to
secrecy on its nature).

Is this young man old-fashioned print journalism’s best hope? He may be
(no pressure, though, Adrian)—as he figures out how to use new media tools
to get new kinds of scoops.

Congratulations!

Ana Maria Soto of Columbia College's brother Onell Soto is on the news staff that just won a Pulitzer for National Reporting at the San Diego Union Tribune. The paper's investigation, done in collaboration with Copley News Service of former U.S. Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham, one of the more blatantly corrupt members of Congress--and to think he's not in Illinois!--shared the prize with The New York Times, which won for reporting on secret domestic eavesdropping.

Ana Maria is the best connected person in the whole world, I think! She is a leader in the Latino communications community--National Hispanic Media Coalition--which is a small but we hope growing component of the Latino nonprofit community's infrastructure, we hope.

Congratulations Ana !