The Chicago Tribune's news apps team writes on Python, Django, EC2, data journalism, and open source tools for newsrooms.
Commenters link it for Bees with Machine Guns, a load-testing tool, along with job postings and the team's Chicago crime data work.
Look for information you would want to see in your available media -- find a dataset and build it into a useful app to be filtered and queried in different ways. Map data points to physical locations. Correlate those things. At some point it all starts to look like a population density heat map, but sometimes you find good stuff in there. And people want to see it. They need more tangible access to all the real world data we have been collecting. Otherwise, what's the point?
I worked for a year at a newspaper and built apps and stuff like that -- it was the most fulfilling work I've ever done and I wish the situation had been able to work out. If I ever get a chance to do real news apps again, I would jump on it. Enjoy your opportunity, Anders, and be prepared to show your work.
Sometimes, the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is applicable. If you build something that shows you CAN build something, show it to the right people and you will attract attention.
Some inspiration:
http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/
http://blog.apps.npr.org/
https://source.opennews.org/en-US/
http://flowingdata.com/
Well, I'm not sure what the point of this was. My team at the Chicago Tribune has been working on visualizing and explaining Chicago crime data for quite some time. Here's one of our biggest projects, which pulls in (I think) the same data Socrata used, as well as our own tracking of shootings, homicides and suburban crime data: http://crime.chicagotribune.com
How we built it: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2013/02/28/the-chicago-crime-site/
More about the suburban crime data: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2014/01/31/displaying-crime-data-for-chicagos-suburbs/
Hopefully one of my coworkers will join in here who's more knowledgeable than me, but remember crime data, such as what Socrata is displaying, is just a snapshot of crimes that have been reported. It could mean those crimes were just more enforced at that time, or more people decided to report crimes, etc. It is not a crime victimization survey.
You wouldn't need a fake network to load test a web app, and you'd end up being CPU bound for a good load test (as in, the load tester would be CPU bound, obviously you want the app to become maxed in CPU usage). AWS is actually great for doing something like this.
The Chicago Tribune actually released a tool to do load testing with AWS instances: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2010/07/08/bees-with-machine-guns/
Here are two recent job postings from the News Apps team at the Chicago Tribune:
http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2009/09/09/hacker-wanted-code-in-the-public-interest-save-journalism-in-sunny-chicago-illinois/
http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2009/12/24/were-hiring-a-uxia-expert-and-a-web-designerdeveloper/
Chris Groskopf of the Chicago Tribune News Apps team just released Bees with Machine Guns (http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2010/07/08/bees-with-machine-guns/), which looks like a lot of fun.