Wednesday, September 08, 2010
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The Indianapolis Star

The Indianapolis Star links at the top right of its opening page to database expert Mark Nichols and a “What You Need to Know” feature designed to help people use the paper’s databases.

http://www.indystar.com/section/NEWS03

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The Sacramento Bee

The Bee’s Pete Basofin writes a blog, I-Tool Tips, on information available on the Internet. It’s promoted on the top left of the Investigation Center page in a box listing recent topics.

http://www.sacbee.com/databases/

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Fort Myers News-Press

The News-Press positions its credit box at the bottom right of the scroll down page, introducing “Online Content Manager and Data Diva” Michell Hudson and inviting questions and suggestions about its database features.

http://www.news-press.net/data/

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The Roanoke Times

The Roanoke Times presents Data Delivery Editor Matt Chittum to readers with a mug shot, phone number and e-mail address at the top of the page. There are adjoining links to his Datablog and to a DataSphere column he regularly writes.

http://www.roanoke.com/datasphere/wb/xp-index

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Cleveland Plain Dealer

The Plain Dealer's database editor, Rich Exner, provides a “Featured Story” for the Data Central page. These frequently spin off the news and events, as did this article using graduation week as the predicate.

http://www.cleveland.com/
datacentral/

Columns and credits

Mostly, the creators remain anonymous

The people responsible for pulling together databases and links to other data mines are most often anonymous. We found only five news websites that identified their editors and provided any recognition to the database managers. Most often, that was coincident with links to columns or blogs those editors wrote about database topics. Three posted pictures and contact information. Three of the editors-content managers blogged about online information and/or wrote a regular column about data of current interest, such as sports statistics or unemployment data.

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