Lucia Walinchus

How do you choose the segments though?

a mario character is driving a yellow truck Alt: The super Mario Brothers

It taught us from a young age that the real heroes are the ones who fix the pipes

*sources

5/ Amusing aside: evidently some people bet some serious dollars that the federal budget would SHRINK despite our blooming entitlement and interest payments.

This guy apparently cleaned house!

4/5 Or you can look at new spending. For example, ICE is now better-funded than the FBI, Marshall's Service, Secret Service, ATF, DEA, and Bureau of Prisons... combined.

What are they buying?

Biden’s biggest challenge: How do you even spend $1.6 trillion? President Joe Biden is racing to spend money to green the economy, outcompete China and fix crumbling roadways in hopes voters reward him in November.

3/5 Or you can track spending on specific programs.

www.politico.com/interactives...

@politico.com

DOGE claims at least $117 million in Bay Area contract cuts, spurring layoffs and uncertainty DOGE’s ongoing efforts to slash government contracts have led to the termination of more than 100 contracts with ties to Bay Area businesses and nonprofits. Bigad Shaban reports.

2/5 Using this you can do stories on cuts in your local area.

@nbcbayarea.com

www.nbcbayarea.com/video/invest...

1/5 Follow.
The.
Money.

If you missed this #NICAR26 talk I suggest taking a look at these slides as there's a lot of great data out there on government contracts.

tinyurl.com/NICAR26-cont...

How do they calculate fundable scores?

Indianapolis has a fun vibe

Behind the story: 14 stations collaborated on this project. 🙌

Coincidentally, I taught a spreadsheets course at #NICAR26 on the same day that this spreadsheet project aired after weeks in the making!

Tune in tonight to @nbcnews.com-owned stations for the local version of how to save time & money.

How to choose the best LLM using R and vitals Use the vitals package with ellmer to evaluate and compare the accuracy of LLMs, including writing evals to test local models.

R folks listening to this morning's #NICAR26 session on extracting data from documents and - importantly! - how to check your results: You can set up and run evaluations of LLM results with the {vitals} #rstats 📦
www.infoworld.com/ar... #DDJ

This is neat: Visualping can monitor websites and has a free journalist plan!

@azmatzahra.bsky.social used this in her Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation that found unreported civilian casualties.

#NICAR26

Oh! Congrats on the baby, though!

I love this! Every day on the Internet, I see clickbait that says “people who succeed at XYZ have this thing in common.” And I think “ugh, that doesn’t mean it CAUSED the success!”

(Also no I couldn’t stomach much coffee while pregnant.)

That’s fair as I didn’t specify😂

What was this T-shirt that everyone talks so much about? When I googled it I only got this:

@ire.org

How did we peak in 2016?!😂

Kids aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but this article misses the point- most countries for years had this same problem but the US did not until we kneecapped immigration. We should be working to keep smart, productive immigrants (like you!) in the country. Then population drop isn’t an issue.

Thank you, Laura for doing all this! So many awesome speakers.

I'm just a person
reading your online tutorial
begging you to use a real data set.

There's a reason law schools teach with real cases and business schools use stories of real companies. It's the best way to learn.

Bluesky/Fun things you can do with bluesky.Rmd at main · walinchus/Bluesky Fun things you can do with Bluesky. Contribute to walinchus/Bluesky development by creating an account on GitHub.

8/8 If you aren't already using Bluesky for your sanity, I suggest it in general as it makes stuff like this a lot easier.

You can, to some extent, design an algorithm of your own: github.com/walinchus/Bl...

Bluesky/NICAR2026 bluesky.Rmd at main · walinchus/Bluesky Fun things you can do with Bluesky. Contribute to walinchus/Bluesky development by creating an account on GitHub.

7/8 Here is the link to everything I have just described in an .Rmd file:

github.com/walinchus/Bl...

6/8 Then you can run this simple function I wrote to follow them all!

5/8 Make that into a data frame

get_socials <- bind_rows(socials)

And filter for bluesky:

bluesky <- get_socials %>%
filter(label=="Bluesky") %>%
mutate(handle=stringr::str_replace(url,"https://bsky.app/profile/" ,""))

4/8 Next, pull in the schedule:

NICAR2026 <- rio::import("https://ire-nicar-conference-schedules.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nicar-2026/nicar-2026-schedule.json")

Make a dataframe of all the speakers:

speakers <- NICAR2026$speakers

And get their socials:

socials <- speakers$social

3/8 First you will have to create an app.

In Bluesky, go to Settings -> Privacy and Security -> App passwords and then click the big blue button that says "Add App password."

In your _console_, type _Sys.setenv(BLUESKY_PASS=_"put your APP password here")

2/8 Note: you could also do this as a starter pack. For example, here's one I did of female date journalists: bsky.app/profile/wali...

But I did not feel like searching for all those names. This was much easier to set up!

NICAR 2026 schedule | March 4-7, 2026 | Indianapolis Welcome to the NICAR 2026 schedule! Browse sessions, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors.

1/8 So you're excited to go to the @ire.org 2026 NICAR data journalism conference!

And you want to follow all the speakers online. This tutorial will show you how do this quickly with #Rstats and @bsky.app.

schedules.ire.org/nicar-2026/#/

Oliver argues that nothing can be done but I respectfully disagree.

Most of the $44 billion Musk borrowed to buy Twitter will never be repaid as the site doesn't actually make much money.

Banks have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to get back the money that they lend out.

Thanks, you too!