Hello, reporters! This is a rather specific tool, but I just heard about it (at the wonderful NICAR Conference) and ended up using it right away, so here we go.
Big Local News is a cool nonprofit that develops tools for journalists, among other projects. They recently released a US Place Sampler, which spits out a certain number of addresses from a certain place.
This is extremely useful if you’re trying to reach out for vox pop interviews, collect info from a sample of places, or do a more formal data collection where you need a representative sample. You can ask for, say, 10% of all addresses in a certain town, or just 10 addresses total.
This is a rather specific task, and the US Place Sampler is obviously limited to the US. But since it ended up being perfect for me just a few weeks after the conference, I figured I would go ahead and share. Also, check out Big Local News’s Tools page for more cool stuff!
One more thing...
Did you miss the last TFR? Use the OCCRP’s Aleph tool to track money flowing between entities around the world