Here, all in one place, are links to all the popular precinct maps that ran with various stories in The Cincinnati Enquirer after the November 3, 2009 general election:

• Cincinnati Mayor: Mark Mallory (D) v. Brad Wenstrup (R)
• Cincinnati City Council: First-place finishers by ward
• Cincinnati Board of Education: Vanessa White (C) electoral strength and Charter-Democratic ticket comparison
• Ohio Issue 3: Casino gambling in Hamilton County
• Hamilton County Issue 9: Cincinnati rail transportation charter amendment
• Hamilton County Issue 52: Cincinnati Public Schools renewal levy

Last week, while on an weeklong furlough from my employer, I created an online database of Cincinnati City Council election results by ward. I’ve now launched that project publicly at CincyPolitics.org. The data’s not very deep yet, and the site still has limited functionality, but it’s the first web site I’ve ever created entirely from scratch. I’ll expand it in the future as time allows.

At some point, I’ll write a little more about how I created it. But for now, a little background on why I created it.

As a newspaper reporter whose computer-assisted reporting skills were self-taught, I mostly used database analysis as a tool to research articles. I started with Microsoft Excel and worked my way through Microsoft Access and two different flavors of SQL, SQL Server and MySQL. I dabbled in enough PHP to get up a few Wordpress sites, and to create some behind-the-scenes databases for storing and searching public records. Somewhere along the way, I learned some mapping skills, primarily with ESRI’s ArcGIS programs, and became enamored with all kinds of geographic-based data: census counts, property values, fire incidents, subsidized housing units and sex offenders.

But as a former politics reporter, I especially loved voting results. Every Election Day, I go in to work late at night, when they’re done counting the ballots. I get a precinct report, cudgel it into a database, and analyze where the votes came from. I’ll work through the night and have a story online by the time most people wake up the next morning.

The analysis can produce some pretty maps for the newspaper, but I’ve long struggled with how to make them interactive for the web. We have some talented Flash designers in house, but their skills are in the design, not in database work. So the online maps we’ve done have been pretty one-dimensional — and require Flash designers to hand-enter election results.

The solution, I thought, was some kind of dynamic database platform that would have the infrastructure in place and allow me to plug in the numbers on deadline. So far, CincyPolitics.org is a pretty simple solution to that. I’m hoping it can get better. It’s mostly a learning project as I try to teach myself new web development skills.

That’s where computer-assisted reporting has been going for the last several years now — taking those databases we used to crunch behind the scenes and getting it out on a public platform so readers can see it for themselves.

The other day, my colleague Alexander Coolidge found out — belatedly and accidentally — that our series on foreclosures won an honorable mention (and a $1,000 cash prize) from Excellence in Economic Journalism from the Fund for American Studies. (From the newspaper: “Enquirer series on foreclosures honored for economic reporting.”)

We came in a close second to the winner of the $10,000 prize: The New Orleans Times-Picayune, for an exposé of insurance fraud in the wake of Katrina. But what was especially gratifying was that, of all the reporting on the foreclosure crisis last year, The Enquirer’s series was judged as good or better than news organizations 10 times its size.

Here’s the comments from the judges:

Well reported series on the subprime mortgage crisis comprised seven of the nine finalists… But a wonderfully reported enterprise series by Rebecca Mowbray of the New Orleans Times-Picayune on insurance fraud in the wake of Katrina Hurricane took the $10,000 award.

Honorable mention and a $1,000 prize went to Gregory Korte and Alexander Coolidge of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The IPJ competition for 2007 drew the largest number of entries in its history.

The seven finalists writing on the subprime mess were the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times, the Miami Herald, Bloomberg News, the Sacramento Bee, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Asbury Park Press. The Detroit News submitted a fine series on the sale of Chrysler Corp. to a private equity group by Mercedes Benz.

The Wall Street Journal threw an army of reporters at the subprime crisis over the course of the year. Bloomberg News produced a number of prophetic pieces labeling certain kinds of subprimre mortgage securities “toxic waste” and predicting the crisis that was about to break.

But The Cincinnati Enquirer and Sacramento Bee series were judged the best of the subprime efforts. The Enquirer’s Gregory Korte and Alexander Coolidge produced more than a dozen pieces showing every aspect of the crisis as it destroyed values, shattered lives, and transformed whole communities in the Cincinnati area. The Sacramento Bee’s eight part series matched them in excellence, but four reporters were involved. So the judges awarded the honorable mention to the Enquirer’s outnumbered two.

The Enquirer’s and Bee’s series almost took top prize. But in the end, the judges felt the work of Mowbray at the Times-Picayune was first among almost equals and most deserved the award.

Judges were Rich Thomas of Newsweek; Mike Ruby, formerly of U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek and the Milwaukee Journal; and John Merline, formerly at USA Today and now AOL.

Congratulations to the Times-Picayune for the well deserved award.

This morning, the Enquirer began promoting a series I reported with my colleague James Pilcher that we’re calling “Gas Price Secrets Revealed.” It’s a look at the vagaries of retail gas pricing, explaining why you’ll pay more on one day of the week and why two stations a mile apart can have such vastly different prices.

We came up with some pretty interesting findings, and we think it’s some of the most detailed reporting on retail gas prices done anywhere.

We’re scheduled to go on WVXU’s Impact Cincinnati program Thursday morning to explain our findings and take questions. The show airs on 91.7 FM at 9:20 a.m.

UPDATE: Here’s the Impact Cincinnati program in .mp3 format.

It’s been 15 years this fall since my byline last appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This week, it was back.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has joined a consortium of Ohio newspapers pooling resources to fact-check election year political ads. Each paper will take turns reviewing an ad for accuracy, and share the story with the other papers. I’ll be the primary reporter for the Enquirer. Other papers participating are the Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, The Dayton Daily News and the Canton Repository.

It’s part of a larger cooperative being formed by most of Ohio’s largest daily newspapers to share stories as an alternative to the Associated Press. (See coverage in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and WNYC’s On The Media.)

My first Ad Watch report, on the Obama campaign’s “New Energy” ad, appeared in the Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch and the Cincinnati Enquirer.