NOTE: I don’t know exactly what happened but this post was up and was kicked down along with the rest of my site. The Homicide KickStarter project was successfully funded Sept. 13 by 1,110 backers who pledged $47,450 total. As it turns the founders didn’t get any bites from newsrooms that wanted to buy their homicide data crunching services, but the following items did sell.
Pledge $500 ore more.
4 Backers Limited (6 of 10 left)Lunch with Homicide Watch founding editor and 2013 Nieman-Berkman fellow Laura Amico at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.
Pledge $1,000 or more
1 Backer Limited (29 of 30 left)
Year in Review Sponsor. You get a preview of our 2012 Year in Review, plus a skype chat with the reporters putting it together, plus a sponsorship message, link and image on the splash page. This sponsorship won’t expire. You’ll also receive the entire collection of Year in Review stories packaged as a ebook.
Pledge $5,000 or more
1 Backer Limited (4 of 5 left)
The Homicide Watch team will guest teach a class or lecture for an audience of your choice.
Looks like some folks with money see value in what Homicide Watch can teach them about being innovative in journalism.
Read my Huffington Post column on Homicide Watch.
This provokes some questions. The big resistance by government to opening data back when I was in government was that data was a potential revenue source for government. Of course, they were not necessarily thinking of crime data in this way, but other types of data was considered to be very valuable and government was making big money by selling it. Now here’s a new groups selling it, so how is that different? so
Back in June, we published a six-month review of homicides in 2012: Decreases in Gun, Domestic Violence, at Forefront of 6-month Homicide Decline.
The story, which included a map and summation of half a year’s stats, took us about four hours to complete. We never had to file a FOIA. We just asked questions and our database started pouring out answers.
- How many murders have happened this year, compared to this time last year?
- Who were the youngest and oldest victims?
- How many cases have at least one suspect under arrest?
- What is the racial and gender makeup of victims (and suspects)?
- Where did most homicides happen?
These are questions every news organization should be able to answer. We collect this information as part of our reporting process and store it in our custom-built database. Now you can use the same data.
For every victim and suspect, we collect a name, age, race and gender. For victims, we also record a date of death, homicide method (shooting, stabbing, etc), place of death (hospital or at the scene) and incident location. For suspects, we record arrest dates and case status.
If you work for a news organization, think about how long it would take to gather all of this information.
We’ll export the data at your request, so you can ask in September (when this campaign ends) or in January (if you want two calendar years) or any time later.
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