William M. Hartnett

I had a good chat about the digital future of local newspapers with Ryan Pitts of The Spokesman Review of Spokane yesterday after teaching a mapping class he attended. They’re looking for a developer to, among other things, help rebuild their site from the ground up with Ellington/Django. It sounds like an exciting opportunity to [...]

I’m in Houston at the CAR Conference and, as usual at these conferences (recent sites: Cleveland, Newark, etc.), I’m loving the view from my room. Consider this admittedly low-quality shot from my phone:

Two more pictures for my amusement, and possibly yours. Both were ads in the sports section of today’s Houston Chronicle, and both convey [...]

Get 2008 started off right by taking advantage of two excellent training opportunities from Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. They’re offering the basic computer-assisted reporting boot camp in Columbia, Missouri from Jan. 6 to 11. (Here’s the typical schedule.) Even better is that the CAR boot camp is followed [...]

I gave a presentation Thursday to the Palm Beach Countywide GIS Forum on how we use GIS editorially at The Palm Beach Post. If you work with GIS in a newsroom and there is an organization of government GIS users in your area, find out more about it, ask if they’ll let you join and, [...]

It seems like there is an uncommonly high number of computer-assisted job openings at newspapers these days. (And by “uncommonly high” I mean “more than one.” It is a relatively small field, after all.)
Gannett’s The Journal News of White Plains, New York, is looking for a full-time CAR specialist to “work as part of a [...]

Is it even possible to say the name of ESRI founder and president Jack Dangermond without conjuring the image of a certain devil-may-care, one-eyed cartoon mouse? I ask because there are a few particularly interesting items from dane-gerrr-monnnnd among the answers to the ESRI User Conference questionnaire.
(OK, I’ll admit that dane-gerrr-monnnnd might have been a [...]

>Court rules Santa Clara County must disclose parcel map data (California First Amendment Coalition)
(Via Dan Gillmor)
Big lower-court win for GIS users, open records advocates, journalists, California taxpayers and lovers of common sense. Pretty much every single story or project I’ve done at work in the past two years has relied on parcel-level GIS data [...]

>Open source GIS with MapServer, part one (car-chase.net)
Chase Davis of the Houston Chronicle delivers the first of several posts explaining how he tackled MapServer, the open source alternative to ArcIMS. As he points out, “Whenever MapServer is mentioned on NICAR-L, the discussion quickly turns to how hard it is to install.” Indeed. It’s like he [...]

>Newsman attending IRE event in Cleveland has car stolen (The Plain Dealer)
(Via Romenesko)
See the second item, after the bitchy comment about the bitchy comments a Chicago columnist made about Cleveland, and under the stupid ad that cuts the story in half. (Do these cookie-cutter Advance Internet newspaper sites make your eyes hurt as much as [...]

Back in the glorious humidity of South Florida, and in a more charitable frame of mind as a result, I can’t help but feel that I’ve been too harsh on old Cleveland. Cold, gray, depressing old Cleveland.

I will say this for the city: It was terribly considerate of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority to [...]