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Comment by potench | Hacker News Reader

This is a very cool interactive article. You land on its best guess for the county you are in (easy, sure) but you don't realize that until you've read through what feels like a "local news" article detailing the average income opportunities and discrepancies in the county and surrounding areas. The focus is on each county instead of the typical approach to these executions which is to provide big filtering options and a heat map and tabular data.

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Yeah, I respect the effect, but it was really weird at first. I don't live in a county that makes national news but on occasion, so to see the New York Times talking specifically about my county and its neighbors ticked something in my head and made me start to think this was a problem specifically in my area of national note, not the application of a national study to my locale.

felt too personalized and felt like someone was snooping in on me ;)

I started to read the article before it fully loaded - the first few lines initially read "Location matters – enormously. If you’re poor and live in the New York area, it’s better to be in Putnam County than in the Bronx." And then it switched to my area. Very cool, could have been a lot more slick - but very interesting approach to creating "local" news.

I think the default is the New York example, I briefly saw that before it switched to "If you’re poor and live in Connecticut, it’s better to be in Tolland County than in Fairfield County or New Haven County."

Defaulting to Manhattan, apparently, if one is in Budapest.

Yeah, once I figured this out I went there from my VPS in the UK. Looks like Manhattan is the default for outside the US.

A little bit disingenous, perhaps, that no matter your location it is referred to as "the focus of this article".

it it technically accurate though.

they use your local data several times throughout the article.

I think this is one of the best examples of a news article written in 2015.

Agreed. If there was a "code awards" for newspapers, this would win it for this year, so far.

I have great respect for the code chops of the NYTimes, particularly since I work for another major newspaper and I'm very plugged in to the latest out of the Valley. Wonderful work they do over there.

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