Two great podcasts on two great news apps that explore government information

Apr 02

Michael MorisyUncategorized , , , , , , No Comments

Of all the recent media startups, few have come with the gravitas of ProPublica, a non-profit currently helmed by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. With ample foundational funding and partnerships with organizations ranging from the New York Times and CNN to Politico and Reader’s Digest, it’s wasted no time in doing important, in-depth journalistic work.

They also have a great podcast series in which Mike Webb interviews ProPublica staff.

In episode 6, Mike interviews Jennifer LaFleur about her work developing Recovery Tracker 3.0, a tool that aims to help the public tracker every stimulus dollar spent. For example, you can see how the $1,368,268,456 targeted at Middlesex County, MA is being spent, broken down by agency and department:

Or you can dive even deeper, and look at individual stimulus contracts.

In all, it’s an immense amount of financial data that LaFleur and her team made easily digestible without dumbing it down, and as she remarks in the podcast in many areas it’s more complete than the government’s own database at Recover.gov.

Mike Webb also interviewed Olga Pierce, Jeff Larson and Scott Klein for a podcast on how the former pair’s Health Care Bill Comparison News App came together, from the inception of the idea over a coffee break to finished product just a few weeks later. While the app itself is relatively simple, it’s a quick, clean way to find and understand a myriad of changes occurring in what could be the most landmark legislation of the decade, legislation that was knocked back and forth so many times there’s a good chance most of the senators voting for and against it weren’t fully aware of what they were voting on.

Jeff’s execution of the application is elegant, and as they note on the podcast, it became a hot tool while the bill was actually on the floor as both pundits and the public tried to figure out what, exactly, this monumental legislation included.

Know of other great government data resources, whether state or federal? Let me know at Michael@MuckRock.com, and we’ll share the knowledge with the rest of our community.