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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 research at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica’s Director of Business Development Celeste LeCompte. The panel explained that most publications don’t keep track of the nature of their stories – for instance, whether it’s a unique story idea or just a reaction to a news event, or if it’s an explanatory piece and or an investigation.
Rosenstiel's team at API has found that watchdog and accountability stories increase engagement by almost half, while daily coverage does little to move the needle.
Rosenstiel also reminded newsrooms to evaluate public discussions and reactions generated by their stories annually, instead of waiting for someone to go to jail or a change in public policy.
Green-Barber stressed the importance of doing network analyses: Who are the actors that reacted to your story, and how is the story used by communities to build networks? She also shared strategies for generating impact:
LeCompte said ProPublica’s measure of success is binary: Did something change in the real world? Did a public policy change? Did someone get fired because of the story?
“We are looking very specifically for places where our work was original enough, and was mentioned by people who are actually making the change, to say that this was attributable to us,” she said.
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 data. She said she uses it to track water flow, temperature and quality in Florida. Many other resources are accessible on the U.S. Geological Survey website, where you can find data on phenomena like earthquakes.
Dianne Finch, a journalism professor at Kent State University, spoke to the importance of knowing how to work closely with scientists. Finch also suggested checking out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coral Reef Conservation Program, which features data on coral bleaching.
David Heath, the data director at CNN, said that America’s system of identifying toxic chemicals is lagging behind, something journalists can and should cover rigorously. There are over 80,000 commercially available chemicals, but only a few hundred official risk assessments.
Heath suggested several resources for reporting on toxins:
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 matter? Security matters because, as journalists, we want to protect our information from hacking, especially when it comes to crossing borders. The first step towards better information security is threat modeling, which allows you to identify assets, adversaries, risks, and best practices.
The next step is to break down the data you have on your computer into two categories: data at rest and data in transit. Data at rest is the information we store on our computers. Data in transit is the information we choose to share with others via email, text messages and over phone calls.
A regular password can be cracked in a matter of days or even seconds. For example, “password123” can be cracked in 6 seconds. However, passphrases can take years to crack. Journalists need to make sure they are making it as hard as possible to gain access to their accounts. A passphrase can consist of three random words like “carrot horse shoe.” Secure password managers like 1Password, LastPass and KeePassX can help you manage your passphrases.
The next crucial step towards digital security is two-factor authentication. The easiest way to think about two-step authentication is to break it down into something that you know (passphrase) and something that you have (mobile phone.) Martin and Tigas suggested a Yubikey or hardware tokens.
Now, if you’re storing important files on your computer, you want to make sure you are using full disk encryption. Panelists suggested several programs:
Data in transit is the information you choose to share with others. When you don’t encrypt a message, it's like sending a postcard in the mail; Everybody can see its content. Encrypted email puts that postcard in an envelope. Now you can only see a sender and a recipient.
When it comes to text messages, here are the best tools for encrypted messages:
Last but not least, make sure to avoid phishing. Watch the “from” field in your email for little misspellings; someone else can pose as your boss or your mom. Also, beware of attachments and links.
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 information to situations. The right side of the brain pays attention to shapes, colors and patterns.
Artist Leah Kohlenberg and Scott Pham and Jennifer LaFleur, from Reveal for the Center for Investigative Reporting, discussed how drawing can help journalists develop both sides of the brain while they work. Drawing is not an innate ability – it must be taught. If you don’t exercise the right side, you think you can’t draw. But do it anyway. Drawing clears the mind and helps people deal with complex challenges.
This is called brain flipping, and it allows people to see tasks in a new way and focus on the job at hand.
Pham spoke about tools journalists can use for organizing and prioritizing tasks. These include:
Some additional tips for organizing and prioritizing:
Drawing forces you to look at what’s in front of you. It makes you think visually and spatially. Concentration can calm you and stimulate brain activity.
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 sat with Michael Corey from Reveal to discuss how data could be made more attractive and easy for audio journalism.
Baran and Craft discussed how they covered crime clearance rates on their investigative podcast, "In The Dark." The nine-episode show looks at how law enforcement mishandled the Jacob Wetterling child abduction. The conversation about clearance rates was light and conversational, even though the material was grave.
In the podcast, Craft was the "adventure seeker," who would come back and discuss his findings with Baran on the show. He would discuss and explain the numbers, creating suspense and developing the story.
Corey played music to tell a numbers story. For data on Oklahoma’s earthquakes, his team, including a sound engineer, used Python and data sonification mixed with piano notes – the audio version of data visualization. The music notes amplified accordingly.
The panel stressed that casual conversations, drama, suspense, music and data can make for rich storytelling you simply can’t convey in print.
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 columns, full of dirty and perhaps inaccurate data.
Journalists ended up requesting and receiving cover pages from the medical examiner’s original reports, police reports, and reports from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Then Joel Engelhardt’s team called family members of the 216 people that died from heroin overdoses in Palm Beach County.
Engelhardt shared his verification story as part of a panel with Jennifer Forsyth of the Wall Street Journal on bulletproofing data stories.
Forsyth talked about her “nightmare,” in which she imagined she would have to take the stand in a lawsuit against her news organization for a story she had not properly verified. To avoid that scenario, she asks a series of questions of her data reporters:
Forsyth also spelled out best practices for editors:
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 all over the world.
She stressed four things to avoid while structuring your data:
Four tricks for organization:
She said data structuring and organization is a lot of trial and error. Instinctual decisions on how to parse, sort and analyze comes with time, but Kambhampati’s simple set of rules is a good place to start.
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, housing data reflects how the market is performing and how it’s affecting their real lives. But for journalists, there are stories to be told.
Although some metro areas have seen optimistic growth in housing prices, the realities vary from place to place. Some still have a long way to go for restoring the market vitality from the housing crash almost a decade ago.
Olsen explained that Jacksonville, the host city for this year’s conference, has ranked as one of the highest “negative equity rates” in the country, where mortgage homeowners are paying rates even higher than the home values.
Several other findings Olsen shared:
Revealing trends in housing data is one thing, but transforming them into news stories is another. Henderson also shared resources and tips for making stories out of housing 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 of the Dallas Morning News sat down at the CAR Conference to share some answers.
Overberg said that indexes can be helpful in tackling and analyzing complex issues. But when it comes to data reporting, journalists’ primary job is to “quantify, analyze and distill” information with a critical eye.
What actually makes a good index? “It’s the power to explain and especially to reveal something,” Overberg said, adding that “simple, transparent and portable” indexes can be applied across a larger population.
Check out Overberg’s compiled list of indexes that you can utilize and adapt for your reporting.
Panelists said it’s critical for journalists to understand what exactly they want to know out of an avalanche of data variables? “Be careful about going on a variable shopping spree,” warned Hacker. Although it can be tempting, a journalist’s ultimate goal should be to simplify and not over-explain.
Fenn added that factor analysis comes in handy when you try to generalize your data by looking closely at differences and commonalities within a set of numbers.
“It’s up to us, journalists and humans,” Fenn said, “to label these [variables] and to find the actual meaning.” This decision-making process all boils down to figuring out what variables are the most important.
But panelists stressed the importance of finding a relationship in the data that’s linear and not cyclical in nature. This becomes essential when you’re cutting through the disruptive noise in column after column.
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 and politics for more than 19 years at the Miami Herald. Lavigne was a reporter on multiple beats at the Dallas Morning News and Des Moines Register before coming to ESPN.
Throughout their careers, data was a staple to their investigative stories.
Doig now teaches all he has learned to students on the newly-created sports journalism track at ASU. Lavigne is a full-time sports watchdog, keeping some of the largest sports teams in the country in line. Both shared their data sources with conference attendees.
Doig separated his main sources into three categories: official, unofficial and academics. The leagues – the NBA, NFL, MLB, etc. – are the official sources. Unofficial sources include ESPN, FiveThirtyEight and Sports Reference. Doig also shared a list of academics, or “obsessed fans” that keep fountains of data:
Lavigne also showcased her sources:
Not included in the session, but some other credible sites worth checking out are Draft Express, Baseball Savant, Synergy Sports Tech and Spotrac.
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