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Crime reports

Tampa Tribune and TBO online have an interactive crime tracking map. Philadelphia Inquirer does something similar with homicides. The Chicago Tribune sorts the data with pull-down menus, but there is no map. An independent website, chicagocrime.org, does a more sophisticated job, including maps. Washington Post provides a searchable data set of individual crimes, sorted by area and by street.

Police blotter

Austin American Statesman puts up police press releases. The blog, The Blotter,  seems to compile every announcement from the department. A paper in Uniontown, in western Pennsylvania, The Herald Standard, explains its practice of posting the state police outstanding warrants list each week.

Photo blogs -- reader submissions

Philadelphia Inquirer photo blog for Chester County. Centre Daily Times also uses Buzznet for several photo blogs, including this one on events. The Mercury News uses it for a pet photo blog. Bluffington Today builds a reader-submitted photo blog on the phrase: You Spotted. In Lawrence, KS, LJworld uses this form for readers to submit photos. LJworld displays those photos on this page. Raleigh News & Observer has many catergories for reader photos, including Kid Stuff. Raleigh uses the same forum to run a contest for readaers to select the best staff photo of the year. The Naples Daily News uses this form for reader submissions.

Restaurants

if you search Boston restaurants on Google, do you find boston.com, which offers one of the best collections of reviews? What happens when you search Philadelphia restaurants? Or Washington restaurants?

Studying donations for casino links

If state authorities in Pennsylvania are not analyzing campaign contributions looking for links to casino interests, could news organizations help citizens do the work?

Congressional Spouse project

Sunlight Foundation project posts Congressional data and asks citizens in each of the 435 districts to provide some analysis.

More on the Examiner Project

Insights into how The Examiner uses citizen assistance on computer-assisted projects.

Public databases

The public pays salaires to public employees and deserves to know how those budgets are allocated, by person, by category.

The Examiner in Washington put this online, and offered an explanation:

"The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper, The Examiner
Aug 28, 2006 5:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Along with who pays what in taxes and who receives how much for  providing what contracted goods and services, employee compensation data is among the most basic and important information taxpayers need to assess independently the performance of their public servants. What better time to start than the first day of the new school year?

Thus, The Washington Examiner today posts the second entry in the newspaper’s Examiner Community Action Network — a partial compensation database for the 21,497 employees of the Montgomery County Public Schools."