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Student blogger JuHyun Lee carried a RICOH THETA m15 camera around the 2016 CAR Conference to give us a 360-degree look inside the classrooms.
Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA
Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA
By Daniela Sirtori-Cortina
Doubt quickly took over me when the "Build Your First News App" session kicked off Friday morning of the CAR Conference.
During the six-hour class — split into two three-hour seminars — Derek Willis from ProPublica and Ben Welsh from the Los Angeles Times guided the group through the process of building a website about the victims of the 1992 LA riots. I'd been assigned to write a first-person blog post about the session, and I was excited to get started.
Some class attendees had some experience with web development and others were coding novices. I was among the latter group. So, upon hearing phrases such as "command line" and "terminal," I thought about packing up my stuff, leaving the room and telling IRE: "I can't do this. I think I accidentally signed up for a session that deals with concepts way beyond my skill level. This is going to go way over my head."
Although I've been doing journalism for about three years, I first delved into computer-assisted reporting and web concepts only a few months ago. Quite honestly, I was terrified of not being able to keep up with the class.
But Derek and Ben quickly assuaged my fears with their coding metaphors and jokes about living a “Pythonic” life. Ben, an editor of the Los Angeles Times Data Desk, compared the virtual environment where our code would reside with a Tupperware container, eliciting a few laughs from the group. He later likened the directories, folders and repositories we would use to a Russian doll, again making the group giggle. My anxiety dissipated, the adrenaline kicked in, and I got working. Here’s the result of our six-hour session, and here are some of the lessons I learned along the way:
Daniela Sirtori-Cortina is an Assistant City Editor at the Columbia Missourian helping coordinate state government coverage. Politics is her favorite sport.
Phillip Jackson, a student Hampton University and a 2016 CAR Conference Knight Scholar, talks with Brent Jones, the data visual specialist for St. Louis Public Radio.
Jackson: What do you do at St. Louis Public Radio?
Jones: I help reporters use data to tell stories, and that can be in a lot of forms. Sometimes I will build graphics and websites for projects. It becomes a pretty wide variety, some of the things that I do.
Jackson: What are some interesting projects that you have worked on?
Jones: We did one within the last month on homicides in St. Louis. We followed one homicide and focused on the victim and his family. We talked about the neighborhood and the people who lived there. I thought it was a very powerful story.
Jackson: How do you go about enhancing written stories with other types of media?
Jones: You can’t throw a lot of data into the story and expect people to care about it. We had to figure out how we could put the human element back in the story. So we just picked one [resident], and focused on him and his family. In the story, there is a piece of audio that we have where a nurse is breaking down in tears trying to help people. To make someone care, you have to have the human element in it.
Jackson: How often do you work on stories that go in-depth, like this one in particular?
Jones: This was a really big project, so we might do one like this just a few times a year.
Jackson: Are you working on anything innovative to enhance your stories?
Jones: We just recently hired a photographer. We are also trying to see what we can do with video and audio really well. I’m always looking for ways to incorporate audio with data. We are always finding which tool is going to tell the story in the best way.
Jackson: Does covering stories that focus on these issues get mentally and emotionally tiring?
Jones: I think it can be. When we did the reporting around Ferguson, it was really hard to describe what the feeling was like. It affects you, and you have to realize that it affects you and you can’t try to plow through it. The best thing to do is to keep telling the story, but take care of yourself so you can keep telling the story. I think it is something that we have to pay attention to. I hope that we do keep thinking about how these stories are affecting our readers and us as journalists.
By Brittany Crocker
There’s a saying in the journalism world: “News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.” Carrie Levine from the Center for Public Integrity said if that’s true, then we should all be writing stories about dark money.
Levine, Robert Maguire from the Center for Responsive Politics and Melissa Yeager of the Sunlight Foundation talked about dark money at a CAR Conference panel moderated by ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller.
Dark money refers to fund given to politically active nonprofits – principally 501(c)(4)s and 501(c)(6)s – which are not required to report the sources of their funding.
These groups can receive unlimited donations from corporations, individuals and unions, then turn around and use that money to contribute to super PACs and independent expenditure committees.
Politically active nonprofit filing schedules are erratic at best. Election spending for this year will not be disclosed to the IRS until November of next year. There’s no donor disclosure and no searchable database of the organizations, either.
So how can journalists possibly cover an inherently clandestine system? The speakers had a few tips.
First, Maguire said, don’t get stuck on calculating “political activity,” but think of the larger question of “private benefit.”
Maguire covered a group called Crossroads GPS, a high-roller of sorts in the political spending game. The group applied for its tax-exempt status as a social welfare group in 2010 and battled with the IRS to get it until last November.
During the back-and-forth, the IRS pointed out the “circular flow of funds” between GPS and other organizations, and hefty political spending from GPS’s grantees.
Maguire said the IRS just doesn’t have the capacity to stand up to these organizations. “The IRS didn’t force GPS to explain how the entirety of its activities didn’t provide disproportionate private benefit to a small group of people,” Maguire said in February.
Levine compared dark money reporting to a nested Matryoshka doll. She said figuring out how the money winds up in an election is like cracking open one doll at a time, looking for where the money leaves a footprint.
Levine started looking into All Votes Matter, a Pennsylvania nonprofit started in 2011. She used tax filings by nonprofit groups who spent money on elections, state lobbying filings, and existing news reports about the group’s activities at the time to pinpoint the organization’s donors. The tax filings pointed her to the Koch brothers, who contributed more than half of the total amount All Votes Matter had raised over a two-year period. The Koch brothers contributed small amounts of money to other nonprofits, who turned around and gave the funds to All Votes Matter.
Yeager said the important thing to remember is that just because something is legal, doesn’t mean you don’t have a story. Pew research says 76 percent of Americans believe money has greater influence on politics than it has in the past.
“People want to know who is influencing their government,” Yeager said.
Yeager suggested assuming your readers don’t know how the system works, who the players are, or what their magnitude of their influence is. Find ways to work with your graphics department to visually explain these concepts.
Yeager touched on another topic, “following the message,” to see who is involved.
She said social media is a good place to watch, since super PACs’ spending disclosures are not itemized and the Federal Election Committee’s guidelines on Internet expenditures are vague. A PAC might call social media “digital marketing” or digital media.”
Political ads can show up anywhere on the internet — including viral memes and even Tinder. Most social media groups have company policies that outline how they identify who sponsors an ad. Twitter uses arrows and Facebook uses a “promoted by” caption.
It’s impossible to see every political Internet advertisement that might be funded by a super PAC, so Yeager suggests asking people to send you screenshots or links to ones they come across on their own social media sites.
Once you get the ads, you can do some sleuthing via Federal Communications Commission filings. Filings will show where ads have been purchased, how much was spent, what the ad was about and who sponsored it. The quality of the filings might vary, however, because the FCC has little to no way to enforce fillings and the contracts will really only be as good as the person who filled them out.
This sounds like an exorbitant amount of effort, right? So why should reporters allocate all this time to examining political spending?
If we don’t, who will? Someone has to make the system understandable to the public, and that’s what journalism is all about. Check out this tipsheet for more information on how you can do this reporting yourself.
Brittany Crocker is a graduate student in investigative and computer assisted reporting at the Missouri School of Journalism.
By Carlie Procell
Mike Tigas, a news applications developer at ProPublica, and Nicole Hensley, a reporter at the New York Daily News, addressed some cybersecurity issues journalists face and offered tips and tricks for working around them.
“As journalists we have to communicate with sources,” Tigas said during the “Digital dark arts” panel. “So we’re in a position where we use technology in a different way. We want to protect our sources.”
Tigas dubbed his half of the session “Defense against the dark arts” and went on to discuss how easily journalists’ data can be compromised.
There two types of data, as well as metadata, that journalist should try to protect:
Data at rest – What’s sitting on your desktop or in your email archive
Data in motion – Any kind of data that’s transferred across networks
Metadata – Data that describes other data
Tigas then explained the resources people use to find information about journalists and other targets, such as:
The “whois” terminal command. Type this command and then a URL name into the terminal and you can find a multitude of information about whoever owns that domain.
Vin.place – A website where you can find vehicle purchase records for any car by searching the owner’s name or VIN.
Journalists can use several tools to better safeguard their data, such as:
Hensley spoke about her experience as a breaking news reporter and explained how she uses several tricks to track people down from her desk.
Carlie Procell is a sophomore journalism major at the University of Missouri with an emphasis in design and a minor in computer science.
By Jasmine Ye Han
For NewsAppers, the struggle is real. As developers, we need to keep up with technology, but the news side of things requires us to deliver content under deadline. How can we keep honing our skills under the pressure of production? How can news application team leaders create a culture of lifelong learning?
Here are some tips from Gabriel Dance of The Marshall Project, Mariana Santos of Fusion, Adam Schweigert from the Institute for Nonprofit News, and Troy Thibodeaux of The Associated Press.
Allow for freedom, but also be able to deal with failure:
Create a culture of sharing:
Get inspired:
Learn from every project:
Jasmine Ye Han is a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism and a graduate research assistant at NICAR. She is working toward her goal of being a "unicorn" in data journalism.
By Raven Nichols
From achievement gaps to the disproportionate impact of the mortgage crisis, the story of inequality takes many different shapes and forms.
Holly Hacker, Kimbriell Kelly, Burt Hubbard and Malik Singleton offered tips at a panel on Saturday morning about how journalists can best investigate inequality.
Hubbard, a Rocky Mountain PBS journalist, spoke about a story he wrote involving the Colorado Department of Education.
Hubbard analyzed a decade’s worth of educational benchmarks in the state’s 20 largest school districts, compiling income and race data within the districts. His investigation highlighted achievement gaps between low income and other students, and between Latino and black students compared to white students.
Hacker and a team of data journalist studied how many out-of-pocket fees students are paying for college. They found large disparities in what each state’s public universities expect families to pay.
Hacker built a tuition tracker tool from U.S. Department of Education data to determine the tuition costs for students at different colleges. The tool allows users to select an income range. The interactive map shows a state’s average net price at public universities as a share of family income.
Kelly, a reporter at The Washington Post, said she believed harnessing your thoughts and observations is the first step in proposing a story.
Kelly wrote a story describing the rise of foreclosures in a large neighborhood in Prince George’s County, Maryland, despite the fact that the county is inhabited by some of the wealthiest African-Americans in the country.
The decade-old neighborhood is 73 percent black and its residents have a median household income of more than $170,000, according to census data Kelly used. Yet, half of the loans on newly constructed homes in the neighborhood wound up in foreclosure during the housing boom in 2006 and 2007, according to the Washington Post’s analysis of private and public mortgage data.
The story was a representation of the disproportionate impact of the mortgage crisis on black Americans.
The three journalist emphasized the importance of fact checking. Inequality stories can be told in many ways; however, a writer has to remember who their audience is and how the story can be told in the best way possible.
A good story digs deeper into the issues and avoids the obvious. Reporters should keep their stories focused, but also provide context, the panelists said. Providing background information is important to connect the dots for the reader.
Raven Nichols is a sophomore mass communications major at Louisiana State University. She is the entertainment and news editor for lsunow.com.
By Carlie Procell
In a Friday afternoon panel, Scott Pham, a data journalist and news application developer at the Center for Investigative Reporting, led a discussion on how to more easily integrate data and technology into your newsroom.
Pham began the session by talking about The Lonely Coders Club, which is a group of data journalists who feel alone in their position in the newsroom. Pham and Brent Jones of St. Louis Public Radio formed the group when they realized others were in similar situations. They thought other lonely coders could benefit from having other knowledgeable people to reach out to when problems arise.
Lindsey Cook, data editor at U.S. News & World Report, and Alexandra Kanik, a freelance interactive developer, along with Pham and Jones, discussed different tools that have helped them in their newsrooms. These include:
CensusReporter.org
Adding census data to your story helps provide context for your audience. CensusReporter.org is very user-friendly and can help you create embeddable graphics ranging from chloropleth maps to pie charts.
Interactive tables
Most data is already somewhat tabular, so interactive tables are arguably the easiest data visualization to make. Make your tables sortable, searchable, and paginated with tools like jQuery, Bootstrap, & tSorter. You can expand your tables by including maps and other visuals.
Github
You can find already-created projects on Github, clone them and personalize them to fit your story. If the command line scares you, there’s a GUI you can use that makes Github more user friendly.
Browser developer tools
Use ‘Inspect Element’ in your browser and the console log to help fix web-based issues. This is a great way to look at dynamically-generated CMS code so that you can manipulate it.
LCC / NICAR-L
Join an online coder community like the LCC or the NICAR-L listserv to get help from journalists around the world.
Once you learn how to ask Google the right questions, it will be an invaluable resource for you.
A browser add-on to copy multiple links to your clipboard.
You can easily build charts without coding. The tool also allows you to change colors and fonts to reflect your company’s brand.
Carlie Procell is a sophomore journalism major at the University of Missouri with an emphasis in design and a minor in computer science.
Maliik Obee, a Morgan State University student and 2016 CAR Conference Knight Scholar, talks to Paula Lavigne of ESPN.
Maliik Obee: How did you get interested in investigative journalism?
Paula Lavigne: I’ve been interested in it ever since college. I was on the student paper at my university. I had some great mentors there. I saw it as a way to hold the powers that be accountable and to give people insight.
Q: What was it like interning for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans?
A: That was the best summer of my life. It was fascinating to work in New Orleans [pre-Katrina]. The crime there was incredible. Just the exposure to politics in the South, because the leaders of the internship made sure you were exposed to a lot of things.
Q: What was it like going from papers like The Des Moines Register and The News Tribune to ESPN?
A: It was the first job I had in broadcast and the first job I had in sports. The transition really wasn’t as difficult as one might think. The main reason I was hired is because [ESPN] was looking for someone who could do data analytics and data analysis for off-the-field stories. It’s been an interesting transition. I’ve had to learn the broadcast stuff by the seat of my pants. But it’s been good. I think I’m in a good spot now.
Q: How long did it take you to gather your data and information for the Baylor sexual assault story?
A: The Baylor story wasn’t really a data story, mainly because Baylor is a private school. We started gathering string on that story in the fall, and we are still actually in the process of getting records for that story. The records requests that we made were denied. We had to appeal to the attorney general’s office. That takes 45 days. They have not been very favorable to give me this information, so that’s actually a story we are still reporting.
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