Somewhere in the tilting tower of boxes that passes for my personal archive are the files from my first attempt at data journalism—an investigative piece about the Minneapolis Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. You’ll find no CDs with database files in there. No printed spreadsheets either; just a small stack of hand-drawn grids with case counts, closure stats, and other vitals. I don’t even know if I had Microsoft Excel installed on my work computer at the time. It never occurred to me that there might be a better way to store and process the information ...

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The new truck accident data is available from the IRE and NICAR Database Library and, as with any data set, you need to learn the pitfalls of the data. Here are some tips for dealing with the problems in truck accident data and ways you can bulletproof your analysis that I learned working on a 2006 truck safety project at The Dallas Morning News:

• Compare state data to federal data. None of these will match up perfectly because of reporting and definitions, but they should not be drastically different. Problems at the local and state level will rise to the ...

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I knew the headline from the fatal luxury motor home crash would be short-lived, something like: RV loses brakes on mountain. One dead. I stuck a note inside my “when-I-have-time” file as a reminder to pursue the story later. Within two days, the accident fell off the local news media’s radar. When we returned to the story nearly a year later, our investigative team had not only uncovered new evidence about the RV crash itself, but also discovered apparent design flaws in an entire series of luxury motor homes. Lonnie Owens hammered the brake pedal of his nine-ton Monaco ...

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I was driving home from work that evening, just a little past 6 p.m., when several squad cars blazed past my left shoulder. Minutes later at home, my phone rang. "What do you know about bridges?" our new city editor asked. I flipped on my television and saw where the police had been heading: the carnage of twisted metal, concrete, cars and horrified victims. The Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis had collapsed into the Mississippi River. It was Aug. 1, just hours from deadline. The St. Paul Pioneer Press was facing one of its biggest stories in years, and ... Read more ...

It started with a recording on Aug. 1. After a family function, I came home around 8:30 p.m. to an urgent answering machine message from a colleague seeking National Bridge Inventory data. About 6:05 p.m. that evening, a bridge over I-35W in Minneapolis had suddenly collapsed with vehicles falling into the Mississippi River. Thirteen people died and many more were injured. In 48 hours, the IRE and NICAR Database Library provided more than 150 news organizations with the National Bridge Inventory. Over the next few days, that number grew to 200. The term "structurally deficient" was ... Read more ...

I was wrapping up a story out of federal court about 6:10 p.m. on Aug. 1 when a reporter ran back into the newsroom and breathlessly announced that a bridge on Interstate 35W had collapsed into the Mississippi River. I looked out the window and saw a plume of smoke. Moments later, the sirens started. I began typing faster, knowing what lay ahead. I had not worked with the Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory database since 1994, when I discovered its complexity and shortcomings while working at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Minnesota is known for ... Read more ...