Follow the burger

Did you read this story yet from last Sunday's NYT?

It's about the E. coli outbreak of 2007 when tons of hamburger was recalled.

I point out this story for a couple reasons.

• It answered the "why" of the outbreak, rather than just sticking to the story of a 22-year-old woman who lost her ability to walk after eating a tainted burger bought at Sam's Club.
  

• The story was told by tracking the origin of that burger. I think this made for a much better story than just following the woman -- which would have been compelling in and of itself -- but would not have answered the "why."

And the tie between the woman and the answering of the question "why" is set nice and high in the story:

Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.

“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’ ”Ms. Smith said. In the simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are not widely known.

(Warning: After reading this story I have sworn off of hamburger. For life. The NYT Picker interviewed the author, asking if that was the conclusion readers should draw from the story.)

Jazz up your numbers

Yeah, you know if it's about numbers, it's Joan.

Check out sensibleunits.com next time you're writing a story with measurements or sizes in it.

5,000 tons of recycling collected in a certain local township? Guess what? That's 28 blue whales' worth of recycling.

Someone has driven 8,000 miles on a countrywide trek? That's 29 Grand Canyons long.

One tip - leave out the comma when you type in your number and unit of measurement. Have fun with this... comment and let me know how you put this to use!

Out of the ghetto

First of all, if you haven't yet seen Blanchard's York County homicides map, you really should, because it's awesome.

Second, it was neat for me because I got a chance to talk to Scott about a concept that I sometimes have a hard time explaining. And that's getting away from the gut instinct to sort content by type instead of topic. I hope I had a chance to explain a little to him about why giving people information on topic is more helpful online.

(An example: We get about five times more clicks to our sports blog, The Lineup Card, from the sports sections online than we do from the Yorkblog home page or our own home page online. That's not to say we can never promote our blogs from a collective place, but it shows concretely what we knew anecdotally to be true: That readers don't come to the site and say, "I want to read some blogs today..." or "I want to watch some video today...," Youtube being the rare exception. Rather, they come and say "I want to read about..." and browse different types of content from there.)

So today, I came upon this awesome post by one of my heroes, Matt Waite, on data ghettos. That's Matt's term for things like Gannett's Data Universe concept, where databases go to sit with their clique and never hang out with the "real journalism."

I'm not saying we'll never have a "database page" on our Web site. In fact, mostly because it's easy for us, internally, we probably will. But it's not easy for readers, so it's not what we'll promote most heavily. We'll work very hard to tie our data sets into related content - our upcoming deed transfer database, for instance, with the homesinyork.com page and our business page, where people know to look for that content now.

Take a look at Matt's thoughts. He says it a lot better than I could. And both in his post and the comments that follow, there are some good tips on how to use interactive features to help tell the story, rather than saying, "I want to use video with a story," then letting the story evolve from there.