The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will publish its last edition on May 3, 2026, after serving the city for 240 years. The paper’s closure comes on the heels of a three-year strike.  On Saturday morning, Jan. 10, I spoke with independent journalist Natalie Bencivenga, a former reporter for the Post-Gazette. I worked with her at Healthcare for […]

This evening I had a good discussion of new media ventures with Rob Kall of OpEd News. He is the founder of OpEd News. It is an open source progressive news site where with a model similar to the original Huffington Post where volunteers contribute articles and volunteers also edit them. We discussed the need […]

The first 6 months of Allegheny Independent Media have been productive. This week has been busy so this is my first post of 2023. I have been trying to line up interviews. One is set up on Tuesday with David DeAngelo of the blog 2 Political Junkies that I will post on Wednesday. I have […]

I thought I would take a break from the coronavirus pandemic and politics to take a look at the history of the craft we call journalism.  The late 1800s were a period of yellow journalism led by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst where sensational headlines were what sold newspapers.  There were trailblazing male and […]

I came across this article on medium.com on how the field of data journalism has evolved over the last ten years. It is an interview with Simon Rogers, a data editor at Google News Lab.  He started out at the Guardian newspaper of London in 2009 as the founder of their data blog.   He had […]

I’ve been forced to move back to Pennsylvania so it has been harder to find the time to post to this blog.  The eighth anniversary of this blog is coming up and I will be preparing the anniversary post.  I have found time to write an article on the new data journalism site Darply on hate […]

I was planning a post on a published study that showed how cities and towns with local newspapers have greater government efficiency.  Events in Annapolis, MD yesterday seem to have added significance to the post.  A gunman who was angry at the Capitol Gazette for reporting on his harassing of a woman, went into their […]

My latest post on Data Driven Journalism is up an reprinted here.   In my last post, I reported that Washington, DC had an extremely high rate of 30.83 hate groups per million residents in 2016 relative to the other 50 states (the national rate was 2.84 groups per million).  DC also had an exceptionally […]

This week I had an article published in Data Driven Journalism on the use of Fisher’s exact test with contingency tables.  It is reprinted here. A common problem faced by data journalists  is how to determine if there is a statistical relationship between two categorical variables such as gender, race, or the share of the […]