Mike Stucka
Mike Stucka was the national data solutions editor for Gannett, USA TODAY, and the USA TODAY Network. He may be reached at stucka@whitedoggies.com or on Twitter at @MikeStucka.
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Articles by Mike
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Choose Your Own Mad Libs (or, how you can plug data into automated stories and free up lots of reporting time)
From housing prices to weather to wages, template systems can instantly generate 100s of stories from numbers people care about
Posted onFrom housing prices to weather to employment, templates can generate hundreds of stories at once about numbers that people care about.
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COVID-19 story recipe: Analyzing nursing home data for infection-control problems
Where to find the data, how to explore it, and questions to ask to reproduce the story for your community
Posted onA USA Today analysis found that three-quarters of nursing homes have been cited for infection-control problems in recent years. Here’s how you can reproduce the story for your community.
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Notes on Working with Big-ish Data
What we learned handling data just big and messy enough to be a giant pain
Posted onI finished a project with a home-built table that was about 16GB, some 60 million rows by 110ish fields. It was…big. Sometimes it was painful. Mostly, though, it worked out, and it got us what I think is a damned good story. Anyway, I think it was Ben Welsh who’d observed something like: We have some good tools to work with Big Data, but not great tools for data that’s not quite so big. I ran into that situation.
Seven takeaways from NICAR25