Tuesday night distraction: Versioned Data Carnival of Journalism

A few days back, Saturday to be exact, the crazy notion I should spend dozens of hours doing content analysis on The Locals came to my mind. For my Carnival of Journalism blog post, I want to paint a clear picture of what university-sponsored hyperlocal journalism is like today. This can then be a foundation for any bushy-eyed speculation I might do about the future.

Sunday evening, I created a Github repository for two reasons: to see how my code is evolving and to track step by step how I’m putting this data together. After all, journalism must be reproducible.

Now that it’s closer to deadline, I want to open the floor. What data points would you like to see established about The Locals? As of right now, I know that the LEV (Local East Village) produced 100 blog posts in November 2010 from 29 authors and 19 community contributors. The FGCH (Fort Greene-Clinton Hill) produced 105 blog posts in November 2010 from 23 authors and 23 community contributors. The rest of the questions I’ve established are in my research notes.

P.S. Another part of the experiment is to see how well Git works as a versioned authoring tool.