Working With Rails

David Herzog is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism. He is leading the development of Open Missouri, a state data transparency web community, for his fellowship project. Open Missouri will be developed in Rails.

Herzog is an associate professor at the journalism school, where he teaches computer-assisted reporting and data mapping. As the academic adviser to the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, he helps run a database library that provides 40 federal data sets to journalists and journalism educators. He also trains journalists in data analysis skills and edits Uplink, NICAR’s online newsletter.

Before joining the school of journalism in 2002, Herzog served as a newspaper reporter or editor for nearly 15 years. His last newsroom job was as an investigative reporter for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, where he used government data to help expose political corruption and document the ravages of child lead poisoning.

He is the author of Mapping the News: Case Studies in GIS and Journalism (ESRI Press, 2003), which details how journalists use geographic information systems in their reporting.