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Posts by Alena Rehberger
Best practices for measuring impact
By Natalie Lung Two factors measure the impact of journalism: the output (how much work has been done), and its significance. But Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute (API), thinks newsrooms don’t actually measure much of either. At a 2017 CAR Conference panel, Rosenstiel spoke alongside Lindsay Green-Barber, former director of strategic…
Read MoreUsing data to investigate the planet
By Haotian Mai A panel of environmental reporters gathered at the 2017 CAR Conference to discuss stories based on public and private data sources. Dinah Pulver of the Dayton Beach News-Journal helps build and maintain the paper’s database of shark bites. In addition to their own database, Pulver also finds water.usgs.gov useful for a variety sources of…
Read MoreSecuring data, sources and yourself
By Uliana Pavlova We live in the age of cybersecurity, when it is more important than ever to protect our information and sources digitally. Olivia Martin from the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Mike Tigas of ProPublica offered useful tips and tools on digital security for journalists at the CAR Conference. Why does security…
Read MoreLeft brain, right brain: How drawing can help journalists find focus
By Abigail West The left brain is commonly understood as the logical side, and the right brain as the creative, intuitive side. This is not accurate. The correct way to look at the brain is that the left side is the verbal side. It is conceptual and anticipatory. The left brain will apply already known…
Read MoreData on the radio: How to turn numbers into characters in your story
By Anadil Iftekhar Data is boring. Numbers are confusing. Limit them, hide them, focus more on people. Haven’t you been hearing this a lot lately? “We are here to say you shouldn’t do that,” said Will Craft. Craft and his colleague, Madeleine Baran, work at American Public Media. In a 2017 CAR Conference panel, they…
Read MoreHow to bulletproof your data story
By Shane Sanderson When the Palm Beach Post obtained a spreadsheet made by a clerical worker at the local medical examiner’s office, reporters had to verify it. The office worker had noticed an escalation in the number of overdose deaths and she began a project recording the details. The resulting spreadsheet had something like 100…
Read MoreTips for building smart, clean spreadsheets
By Amanda Nero Sandhya Kambhampati, most recently a Knight-Mozilla fellow working in Berlin, Germany, helped CAR Conference attendees turn mediocre spreadsheets into ready-to-use data for analysis. Kambhampati took attendees through the dos and dont’s of formatting data in Excel. The session focused on the top errors she and her colleagues have run across in newsrooms…
Read MoreHow to find and use housing data
By Haotian Mai “It’s a fascinating time to be studying housing,” said Skylar Olsen, a senior economist from Zillow. On Thursday, Olsen sat on a housing data panel with Tim Henderson, a demographics writer and data analyst for Stateline, at the 2017 CAR Conference. For companies like Zillow, housing data fuels their services. For homeowners,…
Read MoreHow journalists can distill wide, complicated data
By Dariya Tsyrenzhapova How do journalists make sense out of the abundance of data out there? Are medians and averages actually accurate representations of reality? What are the best ways to improve your storytelling with numbers? Larry Fenn, a data journalist with the Associated Press, Paul Overberg with the Wall Street Journal and Holly Hacker…
Read MorePlaying money ball: how to investigate sports institutions
By Daniel Levitt Sports data often gets overlooked as a source of investigative stories. But Steve Doig of Arizona State University and Paula Lavigne of ESPN showed journalists that we can – and should – hold sports organizations accountable. Both Doig and Lavigne entered the sports journalism world from other beats. Doig covered science, education…
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