I’m happy to report we’ve broken through to real communication with the folks at the Medill Local News map project, and they’re now taking our requests for corrections seriously.
Since we started raising concerns about the map back in January, the response of Zach Metzger, then the project’s Database Manager, has been “You just don’t understand our methodology.” While the project’s methodology does throw up yellow flags — more on that below – that hasn’t been the big problem.
The big problem has been the errors. We’ve previously reported on dozens of mapping mistakes here, here, here and here.
This week, I got tired of trying to get action from Metzger, who was recently been promoted to Director of the State of Local News Project. (Metzger is a Ph.D. candidate in English with no evident background in database management or journalism.) So, I wrote to his boss, Tim Franklin, pointing out specific errors and reminding him that we all share the same values and goals — accuracy being chief among them.
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