Data visualization: Rise and fall of Missouri jobs
Rise and fall of jobs in Missouri and the St. Louis area.
I love this visualization of how jobs have fluctuated over the past five years in the St. Louis area. Link to see the functioning graphic on my colleague Steve Giegerich’s blog, STL JobWatch. The graphic shows expanding and contracting circles each month over the past five years, representing how many jobs were added or subjected to the economy each month.
Post-Dispatch interactive designers Brian Williamson and Erica Smith created the graphic based on research I’d done with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which adjusted the data for seasonality.
The graphic, a snapshot of area employment, reflects the counties and cities where the employed and unemployed reside and not, necessarily, the business locations where they work or worked. The graphic includes representations of the rise and fall of jobs in the St. Louis metropolitan area and the major metro areas of Missouri.
A similar graphic of the national employment scene, designed by TIP Strategies, provided the inspiration for this map.
Plenty of skeptics for Jack Dorsey’s next move
Jim McKelvey shows off Square. (Dawn Majors, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
My colleague Tim Barker had a story this past weekend for our business section about the next business venture for Jack Dorsey, the St. Louisan who co-founded Twitter and has just started generating buzz for his latest venture, Square.
The mobile credit card payment system depends on a small piece of hardware that plugs into the audio jack in a user’s smart phone. With that dongle, a user can accept a credit card payment by swiping the card through it, getting the buyer to sign with his finger on the phone and, bingo, the transaction is done.
Tim (who is one of the reporters I edit) interviewed Jim McKelvey, a co-owner with Dorsey in Square and the guy who helped inspire the idea, thanks to a lost sale at his Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. McKelvey couldn’t take a payment from a customer who wanted to pay with American Express. Read more
Follow up: The vulgar comment & the school
Cross-posted from The Editors’ Desk on STLtoday.com.
As you can imagine, we’ve watched the uproar closely in the wake of my blog post on Monday. I recounted the case of a person who lost his job at a local school after twice posting a vulgar comment on the Talk of the Day blog on Friday.
We don’t condone vulgarity or obscenity on our site. We won’t tolerate it. Increasingly, we are concerned about the tone of the conversation on STLtoday. When we can, we ban people without apology for bad behavior. We have taken steps to beef up our review process and we’ll continue to enhance those measures to address bad language and intolerant speech.
We also miss stuff, so we depend on you to point out those comments and help us deal with them. That’s not new; we’ve said that from the beginning. We want to hear from you.
On Friday, I saw the reader’s comments, I noticed the comments came from a school and I made the decision to call. The school used its server logs to track the comments, based on the time they were made, to a single work station. After confronting the employee, he resigned. Since then, I’ve heard the criticism, loud and clear.
The criticism of me falls largely in four categories. First, that I overreacted, using an atomic fly-swatter to address the issue. Second, that I somehow violated our privacy policy. Third, that I’ve set some sort of precedent for how we deal with readers who make obscene comments. And fourth, that I was gleeful or boastful in blogging about the incident in the first place. Read more
Post a vulgar comment at work, lose your job
Courtesy altemark via Flickr
A single vulgar word cost a man his job on Friday.
It all started with Friday’s edition of Talk of the Day, a regular blog on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website, STLtoday.com. Talk of the Day is exactly that. A conversation around the water-cooler topic of the day. Friday’s edition is often a little lighter. Last week, it was about the strangest things you’ve ever eaten, loosely pegged on a story about deer meat.
By mid-morning, a number of folks had commented about their experiences with Bird’s Nest Soup, octopus, cow brains and rattlesnake. Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted a vulgar, two-syllable word for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.
A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included.
About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
Anti-gay story comments inspire playwright
Joan Lipkin
A colleague of mine has written a story about playwright Joan Lipkin, a veteran of the drama scene in the St. Louis area, who found inspiration for a play from the story comments she found on our newsroom’s website, STLtoday.com.
As Doug Moore described it, the original story (which he also wrote) was “about prominent gays turning to activism.“ Readers posted at least 330 comments on that story, many of them less-than-supportive of the gay community. Unfortunately, the original story is no longer in the STLtoday database, so I can’t link to it. An excerpt from Doug’s follow-up story:
“It is ridiculous that there is a story about a successful gay man in the paper. Now I know why the Post is going under,” wrote one reader, identified as “W. Champion.” It is one of 16 reader comments sprinkled throughout a new play Lipkin has written with Sharon Bandy, a playwright from Chattanooga, Tenn.
And there’s this: Read more
Kurt's Tweets- Funny. SW airlines magazine bothers to mention that pacemakers are always authorized electronic devices. #fb
- A disgrace, St. Louis. People still litter? http://post.ly/OUsk
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- West Countians: If you're in the market for a pancake supper tonight, there's one here: http://stmartinschurch.org.
- The fiddling continues, even as Rome burns.