Tony Meow Now
The Upshot, the New York Times’ new data-driven news vertical, has launched. Most interesting, from editor David Leonhardt’s introductory note:
Perhaps most important, we want The Upshot to feel like a collaboration between journalists and readers. We will often publish the details behind our reporting — such as the data for our inequality project or the computer code for our Senate forecasting model — and we hope that readers will find angles we did not. We also want to get story assignments from you: Tell us what data you think deserves exploration. Tell us which parts of the news you do not understand as well as you’d like.
Dan Gillmor, the first mainstream journalist to blog, who was way ahead of his time in saying “My readers know more than I do,” should take a victory lap. The Times never hired him, but they have internalized his best idea.
Staff working for Australia’s Prime Minister and Cabinet have apparently spent a fair amount of time discussing a web plug-in called “Tony Meow Now” that replaces pictures of Prime Minister Tony Abbott with cute kittens. The developer Dan Nolan and Ben Taylor filed a FOI request to get any internal correspondence related to their plug-in, and now the government wants them to pay $720 in fees to get 137 pages of internal correspondence. Says Nolan, ‘I don’t think there’s going to be any high-level stuff … but it would be really interesting to see how a government department reacts to these weird new kinds of technology and culture jamming stuff, which previously they wouldn’t have had to deal with.’’ (h/t Mark Pesce)
Felix Salmon gets at the existential truth of Silicon Valley start-up life: it’s a miserable lottery with very few winners and many self-exploiting failures. And yet, like past gold rushes, it is warping our culture.
Are they using gold-plated email? The Department of Health and Human Services pays $146.64 per month per user for email, a charge that “covers connectivity, storage, and other email services,” and is independent of how many emails employees send or receive,” the GAO reports in a footnote in a memo explaining the department’s efforts to solicit support for the Enroll America nonprofit.
Tin Geber looks at whether apps can help fight sexual harassment, for us at WeGov.
Enter the dronie.
CrowdRise, the crowdfunding platform for nonprofit causes, is getting a new round of $23 million in investment, led by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.