Other than a fine bottle of Scotch, little else makes journalists salivate more than a database of all public school expenditures, crime reports and campaign finance documents.
This is why journalists have no friends except other journalists.
But we won’t need friends ever again now that Open Durham, a data portal, launched today.
The website includes 10 categories and 200 data sets in topics such as transportation, social services, government administration and finance, economic development, education, health, public safety, sports and leisure, civic planning and environment.
I’ve only started digging in, but already am eyeing “subsidized housing. “amount of sulfur dioxide removed by trees” and North Carolina train fatalities.
I was just building a database of crashes last week using federal railroad data—really. Invite me to your party and I’ll tell you about the most dangerous crossings in town.
