Lisa Pickoff-White

Users can explore in detail the 645 nursing homes that gained the most under a 2004 law designed to help hire more caregivers and boost wages. The database shows each home’s revenue under the new law, net income, staffing rates and staffing wages. Also,  users can sort through facilities with a google map displaying homes that were under the state minimums and by county.

I built and designed this django database with data analyst Agustin Armendariz. The data all comes from information that we had collected while reporting and that we needed to crunch for the print story. Because of the sheer number of homes, we decided to automate it using Django, the Google Charts API and the Google Map API.

This story, and the multimedia accompaniments, was one of California Watch’s Pulitzer entries. The database, video and print stories were picked up and run in several newspapers across California, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Orange County Register and on KQED online.

I explored exactly how much money residents of the Bay Area were donating to Barack Obama and why through an interactive graph, data charts and videos. I was the team leader on this project and used the FEC database and Access to narrow down how much, in what amounts, when and where people donated from. I designed and coded all of the charts, reported, shot and produced video and assisted with the rest of the programming.

View the project.