Yes, yes.  Class is over.  This doesn’t count.  But I needed to add it because this was the missing link in what I think I was trying to say when wrapping up the class.

So, I have time to read things that I want to read.  Cull down e-mail.  Get ready for some fabulous time off.

I found this little gem in my in-box of mail pushed aside until I had time to deal with it.   I pulled it up, and this package by Tom French on Tampabay.com is what I’ve been thinking about, dreaming about, hoping for as I took this class.   It’s in-depth writing — the kind of newspaper writing that you save to read with a good cup of coffee — coupled with Soundslides and the best of toolkit tools.

I’ve not read and watched it yet.  Like I said, I’ve been hording it for later when I can savor it.  But I’ve enjoyed most eveything else French has done.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays all.   See y’all next year.

One feeling I’ve never been able to shake in this class is that we’re in uncharted territory.  The area of journalism covered by Toolkit is like Jello that hasn’t set yet.  Everything about it still way too fluid from the technology to the practice.

My other classes at UF in the practical matters of journalism have been based in what actually happens in the field.  However, with Toolkit, I know that the newsrooms are figuring out what to do with new media at the same time we are trying to prepare ourselves for careers.  To be honest, it’s a little disconcerting, and it makes me want to have the option of taking this class again in two years and again two years after that and so on and so on.   But then again, that’s probably why I’m drawn to it.  To appreciate new media, you have to be willing to accept that there’s always something newer coming down the pike.

That being said, I think as this class earns its legs, there’s a real need to have some of the material from it bleed into the other classes in journalism schools.

Over the semester, I’ve thought about some of my undergrad classes and how they would have better prepared me for the journalism world if they’d introduced some of the collection methods we’ve talked about this semester.

For instance, I don’t think I would appreciate Soundslides as I do had I not taken literary journalism.  Understanding how the elements of a style can be used to breathe life into a true story is vital to seeing why some of the Soundslides Mindy has shown us this semester resonate with us.

Other classes I’ve thought about are reporting and editing.   Everything we learned in reporting class about collecting good information,  and editing class about how to pick the information that pops, seemed SO much more vital when making a Soundslide.  Maybe this is because of the limited about of time in a Soundslide.

I’ve also found myself envious of classes that will come after us.   Although, I wouldn’t have wanted not to be taking this class at this time.   I know it’s the kind of class that will get better as technology advances and as the professionals feel out what they want from graduates.  I kind of like having a seat in the middle of all of it to see what’s to come.  I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it.

More than all of the academic studies that go with other grad classes, this class has succeeded in making me think about what kind of journalism I’d like to see practiced in the future.   As groovy as I think Soundslides are, I also think there’s a case to be made out there for the written story.  As we culled out content to fit into Soundslides, I really, really missed how using words and the space that goes along with a written story to go more in-depth.   It worries me a little bit.  This is going to seem like a snooty print-major comment.  But as print journalists take up learning some of the ways of broadcast journalists and we teach audiences to expect this form of journalism from us, I fear the loss of the depth and details that come with a written story.

For me, I think that’s what I’d like best to see resolved as we continue to sort out what goes into a journalist’s toolkit.  Well, that and how to carry all cameras, recorders, mics and mic stands around with us.  It sure was a lot easier to tuck my pen behind my ear and shove a reporter’s notebook in the back pocket of my jeans.

After the graphic class, my eyes were glazed over with the Adrian Holovalty message we discussed in class about repurposing data.  His crime map was seriously cool, and my thoughts turned to the kind of public records that could be mined and what we could learn from them morphed around and examined from different perspectives.  Just think of all things that officials would like us to continue to miss.  Oh, if we could only computerize I.F. Stone…  tearing those newspaper pages down the center so he could manage the broadsheets more easily sift through the nuggets in all the stories looking for something someone else overlooked.

Looking back though, I’ve got to add that I do have a misgiving about the entry in question about how newspapers need to change.  I’ve got to play the devil’s advocate here when it comes to Holovatly’s critique that about news being too story centric.

“One of those important shifts is: Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.”  – Adrian Holovolty

See, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with information being story centric.  In fact, I think it’s a very good thing.  I do see Holovalty’s larger point that if all the info we are mining gets tossed out there in unsearchable data blobs, we are losing the ability to have our fancy computer gadgets sift through it.  Kinda like the difference between working with a PDF jpeg and a PDF text file.   He makes a good point, a good, STRONG point.

But I have to worry about turning over the keys to the techies.

We’ve talked a lot about the role story plays in any kind of journalism product.  I love to post pure information on my blog, including audio files.  Truth be told, people would rather I write them a story.  (Oh, they like to complain about what I write when I do but that’s another story.  See, story.)  People would rather I package up what happened in the meetings into a story rather than give them useful information blobs.

Holovalty also wrote, “The problem here is that, for many types of news and information, newspaper stories don’t cut it anymore.”

I disagree.  I think there’s got to be a happy medium here between data and story telling.

Repurpose the information in those stories ’til your heart’s content, but let’s just give it all up and be cliche and try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I enjoyed the second part of this story a great deal more than the first, with a couple exceptions.

Reporting

I chose to create a map and look at what the water rates are across the state. I’ve said for a long time that I think McIntosh has the cheapest rates in the state — as far as I can tell. I think this remains true. I called or searched out at least one county offices, city and town halls and utilities from every county in Florida. I thought for sure some of the smaller towns in the panhandle would be lower, but I still have not found cheaper water rates elsewhere.

I also found it was fun to talk to other town clerks about their water. It stopped being fun in McIntosh a long time ago. It reminded me of how reporting on McIntosh USED to be when I first started doing it. I targeted small towns and cities and utilities for the rate comparison. I was surprised that some small towns have gone as far as requesting the water management districts do a study on how much they should raise their rates to accommodate future demand and shortages. In McIntosh, the council just raised the rates in October for the first time since 1991, and they went for the most they thought they could get away with. Nothing scientific in that decision.

On the other hand, I actually talked to staff at one town office who thought their rates were 2 cents per gallon. I had to call them back when I figured the rates. A bill for 23,000 gallons of water would have come to $420. The first woman I talked to was really angry when I questioned her about it. She transfered me to the second who confirmed that the rates were 2 cents a gallon. So, I chatted her up in another direction. It turns out they don’t really KNOW their water rates. Jimmy — the man who set up the formula in her computer — knows it. It’s .002 per gallon, by the way. And even they are higher than McIntosh.

As for the rates, I think where McIntosh loses money compared to other water providers is in their tiers and the amount included in the base rate. For instance, for $9 you can get 5,000 gallons of water in McIntosh. Other places include anywhere from zero to 3,000. The other trend that they town is behind on is charging high volume users more. Across the state, you can see in the rates that anything above 20,000 gallons a month is excessive.

McIntosh has some serious volume users. I chose May for a month to pull an average from for this graphic. It gave me a month where the residential average hit the low 20’s. It wasn’t unfair — choosing a summer month when people water a lot. I also realized why December is such a low water use month two weekends ago when the residents started dragging out their Christmas lights. No one wants to get electrocuted, so they stop watering. McIntosh’s highest residential water customer went from 151,000 gallons down to 14,000 in December. It should be noted that she and her husband won their division for the Christmas decoration contest. (It’d be totally OK to think Griswald’s, here.)

Resources

Ironically, a number of McIntosh’s high volume customers are current and former town officials. I posted a yearly usage report online without names on it and referenced it in my resources for the map. I have another one with names that I’ve used to separate the residential users from commercial users — but I can’t post it without angering the masses. Officials were unhappy that I have a copy of the report altogether. Imagine that.

The other problem I ran into with resources was how to cite the number of sources I referenced to get the water rates I used. I called the offices I couldn’t find online. But still there were 69 different water providers included in my graphic. There was no way that info would fit into the space underneath the map for me to link their websites to…

So, I thought I should put them in the graphic. Talk about easier said than done. You have to be a genius to get links to show up in a Google map graphic sourced from a Google spreadsheet sourced from an Excel spreadsheet. And I am so not a genius.

I had to use code like this in the Excel file: =CONCATENATE(“<a href=”, “http://www.clayutility.org/myhome/current_rates.aspx”, ” target=”,”_blank”, “> See rates.<a/>”)

And then loop it through the directions cell like this: =CONCATENATE(“In “, C13, “, 23,000 gallons of water would cost <br/> a single-family residence $”, “<b>”, F13, “<b/>”, “.”, B13)

Then – transfer all that up to Google docs, then into Google Maps.

Some of the trickier problems was how to handle quotation marks within HTML code in a href tags (to make links) and target_blank tags (to open the links in a new window.) I made a discovery that anything I linked opened the water sites within the window of my project rather than a new window. Anyway. The above works. But it took some playing around.

API

So all was well until I tried to load this thing live. I’d had happy times with my push pins using local drives. But when I loaded the beast live today, the Google map crashed — because live it needed an API key. (Something I had to sign up for through Google, eventually, using my Google account and giving them the addy I am running the map from.)

Then, Google crashed this afternoon. No fooling. I kinda freaked at the prospect of doing this whole thing over in another kind of map. But then the whole of Google crashed. Good times. No support. N0 blogs. No nuthin’. We’re in trouble folks, if we’re this dependent on a search engine. Well, I am, anyway.

I found some documentation that said I didn’t need an API key to use a Google map, however this wasn’t true when it came to loading a Google spreadsheet into a map. How did I get it to work?

Truth be told, I’m not sure because I was trying alot of things. I went here first to set up an API.

What I can’t tell you is whether or not I used the API key or the URL I registered in the map generator. I tried both more than several times before it shook loose and worked for me. The Google crash probably didn’t help matters.