On Innovation

The Washington Post’s new Primary Tracker, created by Kat Downs, Ted Mellnik and Karen Yourish of The Post’s Graphics Department, is a one-stop shop for keeping up with the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

The interactive graphic features the newly-finalized primary schedule, state visits by candidate, and historical data from previous GOP presidential primaries. The tracker pulls state visits from PBS NewsHour’s political calendar and aggregates the data by state and candidate. Live results for each primary will be available as they happen.

When Apple announced early last year that it would not support Flash on the iPhone and iPad, a passionate conversation erupted in the world of web development: Was Flash dead? If not, how would it survive? When should it be used? News developers asked these questions as well, and, at least in our newsroom, the conversation inspired some thinking about how to approach interactive development. Over the past year and a half, there has been steady movement toward more interactivity based on JavaScript and fewer Flash-only experiences.

Last week we published a graphic that compared four federal budget proposals through a series of charts. We used the jQuery library Flot to draw simple, interactive line charts that showed how the debt and deficit would change under the different plans. Flot is very easy to use, flexible and customizable, and is one of many free-to-use JavaScript graphing libraries out there (Dracula, Highcharts and RGraph are a few others). We also built a customized chart with CSS and JavaScript at the bottom of the page to show how different categories of spending would be affected.

In a Washington Post investigation published Saturday, reporter Debbie Cenziper chronicled the waste and mismanagement of affordable-housing projects across the nation. Cenziper, as part of her reporting, visited sites where construction and renovation projects funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had been delayed or abandoned. For our part, we needed to find a way to take Post readers to these locations. Enter Google Street View.
 
We used the photographic mapping service to look up some of the project sites and realized that we could now visually confirm Cenziper’s findings for Post readers. Many of the addresses showed panoramas of overgrown brush, piles of dirt or undeveloped, grassy fields. After Cenziper got in touch with developers on the projects, we created a graphic on washingtonpost.com that featured the Street View shots, the funding amount for each project and a summary of each project’s history. We used Street View for local sites, such as Temple Hills, and sites across the country, such as Anaheim, Calif.

The Google Maps API makes adding Street View panoramas simple and intuitive, even if you have little or no Javascript knowledge. Check out this page for more information on how to do it.

Here are some other examples of how news sites can use Google’s service as a storytelling tool:

Inside Japan’s nuclear emergency » Watch how the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant unfolded.

Brackets. David vs. Goliath. Mid-majors and Cinderella stories. The return of March means the return of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and the biggest office gambling pool of the year. So, how do you win? We’re here to help.

There is little historical data about the tournament that is easily accessible and all in one place. The Post has maintained a database of tournament teams and games for several years, and we decided it was time to overhaul the project and provide a tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

We’ve just relaunched NCAA Tournament Brackets and History, our collection of over 25 years of tournament results, coaches and teams. The project now includes a bracket for each tournament dating back to the expansion of the field to 64 teams in 1985. It made sense to display the data in a form that readers are most familiar with, and it provides a comprehensive set of bracket views that don’t exist anywhere else.

The bracket also features a filter that allows readers to analyze how conference, coaching and previous performance influence tournament success. Many sites provide brackets and results, but we wanted to create a tool that would help inform picks now that the field is announced.

There’s also a search feature that allows you to view the all-time results at a granular level. Try searching by team, conference, coach, seed and bid type to find specific tournament results.

For more details on how we pulled this together, read on…

By Whitney Shefte, Video Journalist, @whitneyshefte

South by Southwest’s (SXSW) interactive conference, an annual gathering of web and technology experts and fans, kicked off in Austin Friday. Crowds streamed into the Austin Convention Center to acquire their badges and head to a plethora of panels, workshops, demonstrations and networking events. Some first-time conference attendees say the countless options have left them overwhelmed, unsure of where they should start. But once they get going, they can learn about everything from how to use games to teach students to how to launch a successful technology start-up business. One session, “Lessons learned from the Arab Spring Revolutions,” featured a journalists who used social media while reporting from Egypt earlier this year. In fact, many of the sessions focus on the future of journalism and how the ways we tell stories are changing. But regardless of why people came to SXSW this year, the conference has swung into high gear, with attendees exchanging big ideas and business cards. In this video, hear SXSW attendees talk about why they came and see sights from the conference’s kickoff.