At The J-Lab: ChangeTracker

Propublica’s ChangeTracker received a $1,000 Special Distinction award for keeping an eye on every change made on WhiteHouse.gov.

The backend construction of this thing is really interesting: Scott Klein, editor of online deveploment at Propublica, said he’d wanted to do something like this for a long time, but the coding was too daunting. Then along comes an intern (Brian Boyer, now the news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune) who said they could just hack it together using sites that already exist.