While I certainly understand the interest in outsourcing journalism, I'd much rather see newspapers do things like http://www.mattwaite.com http://www.mattwait

While I certainly understand the interest in outsourcing journalism, I'd much rather see newspapers do things like http://www.mattwaite.com http://www.mattwaite.com has been doing over at the St. Petersburg times. Matt was the journalist/programmer that created http://www.politifact.com http://www.politifact.com (the first website to win a Pulitzer). I think he's a huge unsung hero in the journalism world. I met him at DjangoCon 2008, and I've been mentally referring back to that conversation ever since. Here's other links to his work: http://mugshots.tampabay.com/ http://mugshots.tampabay.com/ http://hometeam.tampabay.com/ http://hometeam.tampabay.com/ http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/ http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/ Journalists have a lot of training at tracking down public data sources, be it local home sales, sports scores or crime statistics. Those data sources things are just crying out for web applications. Matt's taken that idea and run with it. I hope other newspapers follow his lead, rather than simply outsourcing all their local coverage to Mumbai.