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Lessons from the ProPublica Data Institute

So…I completely whiffed on my stated intent to keep this blog updated regularly. Sorry about that!

But I promise I have some good excuses for going silent. For one, I’ve been working to regain physical strength and stamina after dealing with anemia and a recurring back issue that’s made it difficult at times for me to walk. The other excuse is, fortunately, a lot more upbeat: as I wrote earlier, I was one of 12 chosen from some 500 applicants to the ProPublica Data Institute. The Data Institute wrapped up last Wednesday, and wow, did I learn a lot from it!

For starters, I knew very little about working with data. I definitely didn’t know about all the superpowers of Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. Now, my next step is to devise ways of incorporating more data into my reporting. That’s a bit tricky when it comes to private companies, which are the bulk of my journalistic focus. But at Technical.ly Brooklyn, I also write about tech initiatives forged by the city government, which is likely where I’ll start. As part of my final presentation for the Data Institute, I made a chart showing the share of participatory budget funds going to tech projects in Brooklyn. You can check it out below as well as at this link.

The second, and longest, section of the Data Institute focused on coding and design. I had some background in HTML and CSS from classes I had taken through Girl Develop It (which enabled me to customize this very site), so the lessons on those were mainly refreshers for me. The design principles we learned during the Data Institute I found very helpful: I hadn’t considered, for instance, the importance of considering colorblindness in picking a color palette. And it was wonderful to learn JavaScript in a way that made sense and felt applicable to my work. For one assigned exercise, I made a simple interactive photo that uses JavaScript to toggle between “before” and “after” images of the design makerspace A/D/O in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

(I also contributed to this tribute page a few of us put together of some of the most memorable quotes from our time at the Data Institute. It’s rudimentary, for sure — we definitely didn’t optimize for mobile! — but it was a fun way to acknowledge the awesome teachers and speakers we had during our two weeks there.)

Not quite ready for the pros, but maybe one day!

Speaking of optimizing for mobile…man, oh, man, does building a website from scratch require some serious tweaking! Our final project involved creating a portfolio website to showcase our journalistic (and personal, if we chose) work. We used GitHub Pages to host our sites. I knew the site I ended up building needed some work to look good on mobile devices and laptops with smaller screens. (We didn’t go over responsive design formally.) I’ve since made some tweaks so that it looks fine when the browser window isn’t fully maximized on my laptop, but it’s still quite a way off from being fully responsive. So that’s something I’ll continue to work on.

The final part of the Data Institute focused on web scraping, which was something I’d heard about but didn’t know what it involved in practice. What it involved was getting a crash course in Python! Surprisingly, the little bit of knowledge I retained from Codecademy exercises in JavaScript proved to be helpful, since from them, I learned about concepts like variables, loops, and functions. That said, in no way would I have been ready to write my own program from scratch. I still don’t feel very ready, but the simple web scraper we wrote together at least gave me a template for things to do on my own. We also got a talk on the ethics of scraping, which I found quite insightful. (In a nutshell: if you can get data without scraping, do that, and don’t write a scraper that runs so quickly that it brings the entire site down.)

In fun asides, I also dusted off my basic InDesign skills and got a tutorial on how to make a GIF in Photoshop (which I’m sure will come in handy for future Technical.ly Brooklyn posts!). The Data Institute also provided an occasion for me to update my resume (as part of our design unit), so if you could ever use my services, please do reach out!

The opening slide from the deck that I made for my presentation. (Click to see the whole deck!) It mysteriously didn’t work when I was presenting, though. Bummer.

(Featured image credit: Photos by Mike Tigas/ProPublica; GIF by Lena Groeger/ProPublica)

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Critiquing biased journalism: Shonda Rhimes edition

Viola Davis at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con

Amid all the furor over Alessandra Stanley’s piece on Shonda Rhimes in the New York Times last week, I saw a smart suggestion from Jeff Jarvis about a possible response: use News Genius to annotate the biased/offending text.

So I decided to do that myself, by compiling many of the criticisms of Stanley’s piece that I’d read and adding my own two cents. The annotated piece is below. (I saved you a visit to the Times!)

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The future of Aereo and permissible TV hacks

Studio and transmitter compound of TV station.

The New Yorker recently ran a post on the embattled TV streaming company Aereo. Here are my quick thoughts:

  1. Regardless of the outcome of this case, I think Aereo may have a limited lifespan. NBC et al. have threatened to pull their programming from over the air and become, essentially, cable networks. That would screw over people who still use antennas to get their programming. A better (and more likely) option would be for the networks themselves to offer live streaming, as mentioned by Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times, which they could probably do more quickly than Aereo could build out antenna networks across the country. Either way, I’m curious what CEO Chet Kanojia’s contingency plan is to keep Aereo viable…or is this all just to prove a point about the TV industry?
  2. Cable providers do have a tier for people who are only interested in the standard broadcast networks but would like to avoid having to fiddle with antennas. However, this option isn’t well priced: in Brooklyn, the main providers (Time Warner Cable and Cablevision) charge around $20 a month, versus Aereo’s $8 a month. Are retransmission fees solely responsible for the bloated price, or could cable companies stand to charge less?
  3. But the fundamental question I have arises from this passage:

As companies like Comcast acquire both the pipes (Time Warner Cable) and the content (NBCUniversal) required to make TV work, local broadcasters are increasingly owned by cable companies, and have little incentive to compete with them. This leads to higher prices and decreased access to television that should be free to watch.

I’m not sure that it’s a given assumption any more that television should be free to watch. Yes, there’s a sense of fairness in the arrangement that the networks broadcast their content because they’re granted use of public airwaves for free. But is having access to The Big Bang Theory and Saturday Night Live really a public good? And should we place primary responsibility on for-profit enterprises to carry out this public good?

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(Not) mocking Thomas Friedman on Silicon Valley

The Santa Clara Valley

Thomas Friedman, a reliable target of mockery for the pundit class, writes a column seemingly tailor-made to be shredded by Valleywag, which is critical of Silicon Valley by default:

The first line in town idiot Thomas Friedman’s latest column is maybe the most stupid part: “The most striking thing about visiting Silicon Valley these days is how many creative ideas you can hear in just 48 hours.” These are exciting times, and our nation’s foremost public intellectual blowhard is on it.

Here are my two cents.

I’m not going to be quite as mean to Friedman. It’s true that Washington is plagued with do-nothingness. However, it doesn’t seem that Friedman has paused to consider whether the fount of ideas coming out of Silicon Valley is actually useful for most people. For instance, we get this line:

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, explains how his online storage and collaboration technology is enabling anyone on any mobile device to securely upload files, collaborate, and share content from anywhere to anywhere.

Does this actually matter for someone who’s out of work and struggling to pay her phone bill?

Curt Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, which invented Siri for your iPhone, recalls how one leading innovator just told him that something would never happen and “then I pick up the paper and it just did.”

What did he make happen? Siri’s acquisition by Apple? The ability to get stilted, monotone replies to “Where can I find the nearest deli”? On a product/business level, these are great accomplishments. On a societal level, not so much.

What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: “What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?” They’re fixated on creating abundance for themselves, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination. [words in bold added]

There, I fixed that line.

I have nothing against entrepreneurship, or else I wouldn’t write about it for a living.. Many of these people are doing admirable things, and many within that group are also working to help others benefit from their progress. But building a start-up for primarily personal benefit still has important differences than developing an organization for the public good (as those in the ed-reform movement are learning). I don’t think it’s helpful to compare those two enterprises in such a facile way.

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It’s hard out here for an aspiring magazine staffer

A writer's office.

So a former intern at Harper’s Bazaar is suing Hearst for not paying her. It’s unclear from the reports whether she accepted the internship knowing she wouldn’t be compensated; I would expect so, since unpaid internships are pretty common in magazine publishing.

Regardless, I feel her pain. I knew from high school that I wanted to work at a magazine and was determined to do whatever it took to make that happen. I soon realized that would mean taking on unpaid work. (I was in college just before social media became ubiquitous and enabled recruiting stories like this one. When I started a paid internship after college, Twitter was still relatively obscure.) Fortunately, I was able to do so, because my family was able to swing the costs, and my internships, overall, were worthwhile experiences.

But now, I would advise college students against doing unpaid internships, especially if they will create a financial burden. In my relatively brief experience in the industry, I’ve found that a portfolio of clips/layouts/photos is far more valuable than a resume listing, and that can be gotten by joining (or starting!) a campus publication and working for local publications during the academic year. And, I must note, there are publications that do pay interns: Inc. (my employer) is one.

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If I were a clueless blogger

Latino teenagers in Lynch Park, Brooklyn, in the 1970s.

Forbes.com contributor Gene Marks wrote a silly post yesterday entitled “If I Was Were a Poor Black Kid.” (The original, incorrect grammar in the headline has since been corrected.) The basic premise of the post is that the solution to colored folks’ problems is for their progeny to do really, really well in school with the help of newfangled tools like Evernote and Khan Academy. (Oh, and Spark Notes. I’m sure English teachers did a collective facepalm reading that bit.) There are obvious issues with this simplistic take, but rather than waste my time outlining them all, I’ve highlighted a few responses.

The problem is that Marks seems to think it’s okay to require black kids to be “special” to “succeed.”

Kelly Virella, “If I Were the Middle Class White Guy Gene Marks”

If I was a rich white dude* I would first and most importantly work to make sure I actually saw what it’s like to live as a poor black kid myself before I wrote a condescending column about how we should solve “our” problems.

Jeff Yang, “Opinion: If I Were a Rich White Dude”

*Note: Yes, the grammar here is also wrong.

Update: I’ve come across even more great posts, below:

How in the world can this man create this checklist of things and not realize that he’s requesting that kids do something extraordinary simply to not continue to be in poverty: forget their surroundings.

Elon James White, “Why Forbes’ Column Crossed the Line”

It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings–to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “A Muscular Empathy”

If I were a rich white motivational speaker, I would first and most importantly make sure that I ignored all historical and social facts about the group of people I was addressing.

Jesse Taylor, “If I Were a Rich White Motivational Speaker”

Brown vs. Board of Education is the most misunderstood Civil Rights case of them all. This was NOT about integration, not about the chance to hold hands with white kids on the playground and attend the same classes. It was about black schools, black businesses and black neighborhoods given the EXACT SAME RESOURCES as their white counterparts, but that somehow got lost in the movement.

Chris Stevens, “Forbes article proudly parrots bootstrap mentality”

There’s also a great round-up of responses at Racialicious. Update: And another one from a Forbes staff writer, who correctly concludes that Marks is trolling.

And from Twitter:

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Black in America, Silicon Valley edition: thoughts

Black women in tech gather for discussion

Last night, the much-ballyhooed Black in America 4, which followed the participants of the NewME Accelerator, finally aired. (I caught the 11 pm re-airing after catching up on violin practice and refusing to watch the NY Jets get blown out in the second half of Sunday Night Football.) It generated some advance controversy, courtesy of Michael Arrington (more on that here), but in the end, I thought it was a solid take on the challenges for black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Some random thoughts:

  • I would have liked to learn more about how the accelerator was put together, especially given the pretext that blacks lack influence and stature in Silicon Valley. Despite that, NewME seemed to have a solid set of advisors.
  • That said, what was the real point of Vivek Wadhwa’s talk? All I got from the documentary was “black entrepreneurs should get white frontmen for their companies” and “black folks don’t support each other.” The second point is valid, but I really hope there was more meat to his talk that CNN just didn’t show.
  • NewME co-founder Angela Benton has a really inspiring story: from teenage mother to Web entrepreneur. The documentary makes note of the difficulty of her and Wayne Sutton (the accelerator’s other co-founder) having to leave children/family behind to work on their startups. There has been discussion around whether motherhood is a barrier for women in tech, and I wonder if family concerns are a similar issue for blacks in tech. Plenty of people argue that youth is an advantage for entrepreneurship: there isn’t as much risk in failure because founders rarely have family responsibilities. But that isn’t really true for a lot of black and Latino 20-somethings. And even those without kids of their own may have other family members to support.
    *Note: this is a class issue as much as it is a race one, but of course, race and class tend to be closely linked.
  • In hindsight, it’s really a shame that the Michael Arrington bit got the most attention leading up to the air date, because it was by far the least insightful segment. He was unprepared and made clueless (and somewhat offensive) remarks, but then I wasn’t impressed with Soledad O’Brien’s questions to him, either. Given the scarcity of black tech entrepreneurs, I don’t think asking who Arrington thinks is the “#1 black entrepreneur” was bound to yield a useful response. (Though it is still ridiculous that he couldn’t name any black entrepreneurs at all–really?)
  • I’d really like an explanation of how even the organizers of the accelerator were unprepared for the dragon’s den at the Google event. I agree with Navarrow Wright, one of the panelists at the event, that entrepreneurs should be ready to pitch at any time, but there is a difference between speaking one-on-one with a potential investor/advisor/customer and having to make a formal pitch on stage. Does Y Combinator or TechStars spring this on its participants?
  • Also, I’m curious what it was like for Benton and Sutton to run the accelerator and work on their companies at the same time. How much support/advice were they able to give the others?

If you saw BIA 4, what did you think of it?

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The Stephen Colbert of tech

Stephen Colbert on "The Colbert Report"

“I don’t see race.”

That’s Michael Arrington’s response to the CNN Money post regarding his statement that he doesn’t know a “single black entrepreneur” in the upcoming Black in America 4 special.

In all seriousness, though, I agree with him that Soledad O’Brien’s question “Who would you say is the #1 black entrepreneur?” was a gotcha. I’m not a big fan of the Black in America series on CNN, and this dust-up is exactly why. Sensationalism wins out over providing any real insight.

That said, I’ve recently heard/read a pair of anecdotes about TechCrunch summarily dismissing pitches regarding black entrepreneurs. (One of them, regarding NewME Accelerator, the subject of the BIA special, is here.) So I’m not 100 percent convinced that TechCrunch and Arrington just aren’t hearing from any black folks.

However, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t matter all that much. I’ll have to co-sign NewME Accelerator co-founder Angela Benton: ignore the drama. Better yet, come up with ways to encourage black people to get into tech, wherever they are. Hint: most of them won’t be in Silicon Valley.

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Responsible writing, stereotypes, and data

African American family playing a board game

This week has been very busy, with us closing our November issue, and I’ve already fallen short of my goal to blog at least once a week. Oh well. When I finally had the time to catch up on some of my favorite non-business blogs, I noticed a lot of discussion involving a campaign called No Wedding, No Womb. I immediately disliked the title, because it calls to mind a very annoying Beyoncé song: you know, the one accompanied by a dance routine ripped off from Bob Fosse.

But beyond that, the whole campaign rests on the weird notion that black women, unlike everyone else, don’t consider the consequences of pregnancy outside of marriage and that, somehow, just airing the idea that “you should raise your child in a committed relationship*!” will change things. (‘Cause we’ve never heard that one before.) It’s pretty fogeyish, in my opinion. Notice I didn’t say “conservative” or “reactionary.” There are fogeys across the political spectrum.

Another aggravation is that the data around this topic are frequently miscontrued. In fact, it really annoys me that stats are tossed out so cavalierly, not just regarding this particular issue, but in general. One series of instances that irks me—especially since Inc. covers it in the October issue—is OkCupid and its OkTrends blog, which has released incredibly deep insights such as that black women aren’t desirable and that Protestants don’t write good. Of course, they give no information about their sample sizes for particular demographics, which is why several observers have raised their doubts. But ultimately, that doesn’t matter, as long as the company can make bank. CNN has even made a running franchise out of the practice.

Anyway, back to No Wedding, No Womb: I believe the campaign is well-intended. But given that black women have become the media’s second-favorite punching bag lately (Muslims are still tops), I just have to say: its participants need to do better than this.

*Although the campaign is called “No Wedding, No Womb,” apparently it’s not going for “marriage at all costs,” like another infamous campaign targeting unwed black parents.