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Court records have long been a vital tool for journalists looking to hold powerful corporations accountable. But what happens when disputes between companies and consumers move out of open court and into private meeting rooms? What happens when class action lawsuits – and the wealth of human sources and records that go with them – start to disappear?
Journalists at The New York Times found themselves wrestling with some of these questions as they reported out a three-part series on the rise of arbitration clauses.
Arbitration clauses are tucked into everything from terms of service to employment agreements. They’re used by giants like AT&T, Starbucks and Netflix, as well as smaller companies like Ashley Madison, the adultery dating website. The clauses funnel consumers’ grievances into private hearings where, instead of a judge and jury, people make their case to a corporate lawyer or professional arbitrator. The proceedings play out behind closed doors; there are no appeals, few rules and little oversight.
By interviewing scores of lawyers, judges and plaintiffs, Times reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery were able to piece together a picture of what people can expect if they’ve signed an arbitration clause: Companies can compel arbitration according to religious texts — whether it’s the Bible or the tenets of Scientology. Evidence can be suppressed. Witnesses can be influenced. Class action lawsuit can be explicitly forbidden.
But how could the reporters move beyond anecdotes? Their sources portrayed arbitration as fundamentally reshaping the American justice system — but how do you quantify that?
Enter Robert Gebeloff, a database projects editor for the Times. He came to the paper in 2008 from the Star-Ledger, and by his own estimation he’s been specializing in data journalism for about 20 years. At the Times he works in partnership with other reporters, bringing his skills to bear on stories that need data analysis.
“Traditionally, what data journalism has meant is getting a data set from a government agency and analyzing it,” Gebeloff said.
But that’s changing.
Nowadays, he said, governments don’t have the data reporters want, or they won’t release it, or it’s formatted inconveniently. So Gebeloff’s job is increasingly focused on designing ways to scrape the data he wants from official sources. That’s what he set out to do for the arbitration story.
Spotting trends
Even though arbitration hearings are opaque by design, the Times found a few ways to glean enough data to discern some trends. Silver-Greenberg knew California law requires any arbitration company operating in the state to open their entire docket to the public, Gebeloff said, creating a window into every case arbitrated across the country. But it was messy.
Some companies didn’t follow California’s law, and the state didn’t enforce any sort of uniform reporting standards. Even within a single company, different arbitrators disclosed different information in different formats, Gebeloff said. It wasn’t unusual for arbitrators to leave key sections blank.
“The only thing we’d know was a case had been held involving a certain company,” he said. “And that would pretty much be it.”
Nonetheless, Gebeloff began scraping, parsing and pulling the dockets. Standardization was the name of the game; he came up with 25,000 arbitration files, and he created some basic rules for appending the data fields to one another. That made it easier to stack the data into clear categories — the companies, the judges, the outcomes — and it also demonstrated which questions they could answer with their limited dataset. One of the most important trends revealed in the data was how often the same arbitrators handled cases for a single company, creating the appearance of clientelism.
The Times team wanted to be careful about drawing conclusions from such a database pieced together from such sloppy sources, though. Even if a case detailed how much a customer was awarded, many didn’t list how much the customer had sought. For example, Gebeloff said, “did they win $5 on a $10 claim, or did they win $5 on a $50,000 claim?”
So Gebeloff devised a system for classifying wins and losses: He’d consider a win any time the consumer was awarded at least $1. “On one hand you say, OK, so it’s possible some of these people we’re counting as winners maybe don’t feel like winners,” he said. “But on the other hand, it’s good because it’s a conservative measure.”
Even with that generous accounting, the percentage of people who win cases against companies through arbitration is low, he said. But the Times team was careful in phrasing their findings:
“The Times found that between 2010 and 2014, only 505 consumers went to arbitration over a dispute of $2,500 or less.
Verizon, which has more than 125 million subscribers, faced 65 consumer arbitrations in those five years, the data shows. Time Warner Cable, which has 15 million customers, faced seven.”
The Times’ data couldn’t reveal arbitration’s inequities, per se; Silver-Greenberg and Corkery’s shoe-leather reporting had that covered. Rather, the data was better suited to demonstrating absences, Gebeloff said. “The bigger points we make with this data are simply counting.”
It wouldn’t have made sense to try to squeeze from the data any conclusions about arbitration outcomes, he said. “If these people had, in theory, been able to go to court, would they have had better outcomes? I mean, that’s just unknowable.”
“You could never build a dataset that says, OK, this is what happened in arbitration and this is what happened in comparable court cases. There’s just no way of knowing that. And so people are left to theorize and argue.”
Working with the data
As Gebeloff was beginning to pull together the data on arbitration, Silver-Greenberg and Corkery’s reporting was beginning to suggest that arbitration’s deepest effect was to make companies impervious to class-action lawsuits.
To test that theory, Gebeloff turned to Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ proprietary database of court cases. Gebeloff pulled the dockets for every case between 2010 and 2014 where a company faced a class-action lawsuit. He downloaded each docket as a paper-formatted report and, using a program he wrote, extracted all the information he could: Case numbers, judges, plaintiffs, defendants, court names, each individual motion in the trial. Gebeloff turned them all into rows and columns.
At first he only came up with a few hundred cases. Then he tried searching the database a few different ways. Then he doubled his timeframe.
After discarding about 500 bad hits, he came up with about 1,700 cases where a company tried to dissolve a class-action lawsuit by invoking arbitration. Gebeloff poured through them all.
This data set wasn’t perfect either, he said, but it was more reliable than the first. He was looking for how often a company successfully used a “motion to compel arbitration,” but it wasn’t always a clear yes-or-no answer, he said. Sometimes an arbitration clause only covered a few people in the class-action. Sometimes a case was settled before a judge ruled on it.
“Reality’s often messy, and so we had to account for the messiness of reality,” he said. “But ultimately, the benefit of going through this was now we had a database that nobody else has ever had.”
Building that database drew on skills he’s honed for decades, but it also required reaching out to others who’ve attempted to wrangle similar data.
“The most important thing in doing this type of work is to know how to learn... and to know what’s possible,” he said. “Six months ago, I wouldn’t have known everything I know about getting things out of Westlaw or turning it into paper records or turning the paper record into a database, but I knew it was possible to do, and then every step of the way, I had enough background to learn what I needed to know how to do it.”
Adam Aton is a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism and a student employee at IRE. You can follow him on Twitter here or email him at adama@ire.org.
IRE is proud to congratulate several IRE members who were honored with 2016 duPont-Columbia Awards. Their hard work and dedication to good investigative journalism helps keep the public informed and educated on important topics that affect their communities.
Jacquee Petchel, Mark Lodato, Erin Patrick O'Connor, Jessica Boehm and Dominick DiFurio and the team at Cronkite News | Arizona PBS for "Hooked: Tracking Heroin's Hold on Arizona." More than 70 students and eight faculty members participated in this innovative project that chronicled addicts struggling to maintain sobriety, as well as law enforcement’s struggle to tamp down the growing epidemic of young abusers.
Josh Fine along with colleagues at HBO Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel for "The Price of Glory." Spanning four years of research, four continents, and scores of interviews, this extensive investigation into Qatar’s plan to achieve international recognition through sport exposed the price it has exacted in fair play, human rights, and even human lives.
Craig Cheatham along with colleagues at KMOV-TV in St. Louis for "The Injustice System: Cops, Courts and Greedy Politicians." In the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown and the ensuing crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, KMOV found a system driven by profit with mandated quotas directing police officers to write tickets and small municipal courts making money off of speed traps and fines.
Noah Veltman, John Keefe and the team at WNYC for "NYPD Bruised." In the immediate aftermath of the chokehold death of Eric Garner on Staten Island, WNYC embarked on a months-long exploration that went far beyond routine coverage of the NYPD's use of force.
Kelly Hinchcliffe and colleagues at WRAL-TV in Raleigh for "Journey Alone." An excellent example of local reporting, WRAL reporters traveled from North Carolina to the Rio Grande Valley, where tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors illegally crossed the border from Mexico into the US. The team traced the children’s journey to find out how they got there, what kind of care they received and how the crisis is impacting North Carolina.
Learn more about the awards and winners on the Columbia Journalism School’s website.
Hands-on classes that require preregistration have been opened up for the 2016 CAR Conference in Denver, giving you the opportunity to guarantee your seat in several data journalism tracks taught by top reporters and editors from around the country.
These classes, which include returning favorites like “PyCAR” and “Build your first news app,” fill quickly and are first come, first serve. If you haven’t yet registered for the conference, you can add a preregistered session during the checkout process.
They are ideal for conference-goers who are looking to gain some practical experience in a specific data journalism skill. Maybe you're just starting out and could benefit from our boot camp-style introduction to spreadsheets and databases for reporting, "Digging into data for stories." IRE also offers roadmaps for the more experienced data journalist, whether it’s demystifying the fundamentals of R and its must-have libraries for statistics or learning the ins-and-outs of Esri’s ArcGIS for mapping analysis techniques.
Remember, too, that you’ll have a wide variety of options that don't require preregistration each hour across more than a dozen rooms.
Please visit this link for more information about the classes we’re offering in 2016 and email conference@ire.org with any questions you might have.
Every reporter has their own version of the story bucket list – a collection of ideas or issues they can’t die without covering. On this episode, we’ll hear how G.W. Schulz of The Center for Investigative Reporting crossed one off of his. G.W. spent nearly eight years reporting on America’s missing and unidentified dead, unearthing stories about the victims, their loved ones and the sleuths trying to close their cases for good.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Shawn Shinneman reported and produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
MUSIC
“You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive" is performed by the Ruby Friedman Orchestra
Cylinder Six (Chris Zabriskie) / CC BY 4.0
Strange Bird (Instrumental) (Lisa Germano) / CC BY-NC 3.0
Jettisoned (Podington Bear) / CC BY-NC 3.0
IMF (Dot) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Dear friends,
In recent months, the movie Spotlight has reminded many of us of the crucial role of investigative reporting in holding powerful institutions accountable. IRE continues to make sure that investigative reporting can thrive, even in tough times.
We're coming off another successful year, but there is much more work to do. Governments are putting up more barriers to information; newsrooms are trimming reporting staffs and reducing budgets for hard-hitting investigations. IRE arms journalists with the skills and support they need to fight against these trends and continue doing quality work that makes a difference.
I have already made my donation this year, and I hope you will join me in supporting IRE this year. There is no better way to make an impact this holiday season than by helping IRE help journalists become the watchdogs our society so badly needs.
You can now make a donation by visiting http://safedonate.us/4IRE or texting 4IRE to 41444.
Thank you for your continued support of IRE, and I look forward to seeing you in Denver for NICAR and New Orleans for the IRE Conference.
Sarah Cohen
President, IRE Board of Directors
Nathaniel Lash
Nathaniel Lash is a data reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He was part of a team of journalists who worked on "Failure Factories," a series that explored how five Pinellas County schools became some of the worst in Florida.
How would you describe your job?
I work at the Tampa Bay Times as a data reporter, where I develop and use technology to conceive of, report out and publish stories. Right now, I work mostly with members of the investigative team on their data-heavy projects, which involves acquiring, cleaning, connecting and analyzing data, as well as visualizing it for the web.
How did you get started in data journalism?
The summer before my sophomore year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was lucky enough to attend an IRE Watchdog Workshop, which sparked an awareness of what kinds of records public agencies collect and maintain. It proved useful pretty quickly. That fall, news broke of "possible inaccuracies" in how the university’s law school reported student test scores, the benchmark of a law school’s quality (and rank). While the university’s investigation was ongoing, we requested the raw test scores for students admitted to the law school, and saw that the highly coveted median LSAT scores been inflated for years. Before we could publish — the day after we got the records — the university released findings that exactly matched ours. I’ve taken data journalism pretty seriously since then.
That got me working with data for a bit, but the only reason I was able to get into writing code and working with databases is thanks to Michael Corey and Augie Armendariz, who brought me under their wing at the Center for Investigative Reporting for a summer and taught me how code fits with investigative journalism.
What are your go-to tools and programs when working on a story that involves data?
For any story that involves data, the tool at the top of my list is experts. A lot of the time that means those who work either at the source of the data or as researchers. But another frequently untapped source is the people who deal with the real-world bits of that data all the time: reporters in your newsroom.
As far as technology is concerned, I do most of my data analysis in iPython notebooks, which makes working with the data analysis package pandas a breeze. It also makes on-the-fly visualization a lot simpler — one of my favorite libraries for that is Seaborn, which simplifies the process for a lot of standard statistical visualizations.
For projects like the Failure Factories series, we had to maintain and connect a lot of different datasets. For those kinds of tasks, I usually turn to something like Django, a Python web framework that makes managing, analyzing and publishing data much easier.
Still, as great as some of these tools are, nothing beats Excel when I need an answer from smaller datasets quickly.
"For any story that involves data, the tool at the top of my list is experts."
At what point in the reporting process for “Failure Factories” were you brought on to create the graphic?
Reporters Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick and Lisa Gartner, and data specialist Connie Humburg had been requesting documents and records from the state’s department of education and the school district for eight months before I arrived at the Times as an intern in January. About a month after I started, I began switching between contributing analysis on the project and developing graphics until the stories started running in August.
Communication is key when working in a group, so how did you keep all the reporters working on various components of the story on the same page?
We work together! Cara and Lisa, education reporters who ordinarily worked on the other side of the newsroom, physically moved their desks over to the investigative team’s pods, and the data team — the group of data specialists, designers and developers to which I belong — works adjacent to that team. There was a constant back-and-forth between the other reporters and me, as well as the rest of the data team.
This interview has been edited for clarity. Interview by Maggie Angst.
IRE members are invited to participate in a research project conducted by the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The purpose of the study is to investigate journalists’ attitudes toward transparency in the news industry. This research is designed to understand how journalists comprehend, apply, and perceive the concept of transparency in a professional environment.
This study seeks to survey a large, national sample of professional U.S. journalists. The research is guided by these questions:
Questions about the survey can be directed to Peter Gade at pgade@ou.edu.
The 4th annual Tapestry Data Storytelling Conference will be held at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado on Wednesday March 9th, 2016. Tapestry is an event designed to advance interactive online data storytelling, bringing together different viewpoints with the goal of generating a rich conversation about data storytelling.
This one-day, invitation-only conference includes keynotes from speakers like ProPublica’s Scott Klein, short stories from developers like Trina Chiasson, and a demo theater designed to provoke ideas and dialogue across disciplines.
The registration fee is waived for attendees in journalism, and transportation from the conference to Denver will be provided for attendees who also plan to attend NICAR. For more information, and to request your invitation to attend or present, visit the Tapestry Conference website at http://www.tapestryconference.com/
By Rana Sabbagh | Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism
Amman, November 29, 2015 – Most top Arab TV presenters and journalists are remarkably candid these days about their survival kit: hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil.
After a brief lull, brought about by the Arab Spring upheavals, they have decided to support their governments and rulers and serve as their mouthpiece. If they hadn’t, they’d have risked job losses, beatings, arbitrary trials, harassment and jail – courtesy of the new anti-terror laws, introduced by Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
These statutes, along with internet restrictions, a whole range of repressive policies and authoritarian resurgence in Egypt and elsewhere, have effectively hammered the final nail into the coffin of free speech across much of the region.
Editor's Note: The Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) Conference begins Friday. The group's executive director, Rana Sabbagh, discusses the difficulties faced by journalists in the region on the eve of this annual gathering.
As a result, the state’s narrative is, more often than not, the only narrative to appear and officials can relax in the knowledge that the media no longer dare hold them to account. “What is wrong with being pro-government," ask the reporters?
“Why should we cry over spilt milk?”
My answer to that is simple: it’s your job.
In Jordan 95 percent of 250 journalists, surveyed in May by a local media advocacy group, admitted practicing self-censorship. Most, according to the Center for Defending the Freedom of Journalists (CDFJ), said they were “too scared” to criticize the king, the security forces or the tribal leaders.
So much for the freedoms on offer in this much-vaunted “moderate” Arab state – one of Washington’s leading allies in the region and the darling of international donors. But elsewhere it’s worse.
So why have the lights of free speech and independent media been extinguished across much of the region?
The answer is depressing.
Journalists and editors, who put their career on the line to hold officials accountable, have found a shocking lack of public support. At every turn they have seen ordinary Arabs give up on basic freedoms and democratic rights for nothing more than vague promises of stability and economic prosperity.
Not that these promises were kept. Those same people are the first to complain about the rocketing price of food, poor basic healthcare and sub-standard education. Where are the promised jobs, they ask? Where, in the face of mounting terror attacks, is the promised security?
Even in Tunisia, the poster child of the Arab Spring, much of the population remains skeptical. And yet opinion polls still indicate that a majority would welcome back the same dictator they ousted in January 2011.
The fact is that people are more afraid of chaos in the region – the civil wars and failed states, the death, destruction and drowning – than they are of “normal” Arab repression by the state. They grew up with it, lived with it for decades, found ways to work around it. It’s the devil they know.
Hardly surprising, therefore, that free and independent journalism is pretty low down – or non-existent – on their list of priorities and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
That is the sad reality in today’s Arab World.
What is to be done? Should journalists and writers simply give up the battle to serve an unappreciative society and wait for better times? I don’t believe so.
But the cost of “watchdog” journalism will be very high.
Weeks ago, Aazza Hinawi, TV presenter on state-run TV station “Cairo” was taken off the air after launching an impromptu criticism of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s policies. She was reinstated after receiving a written warning from her employers.
Since Egypt’s first-elected Islamist President Mohammad Morsi was toppled in 2013, Cairo has come under fire for cracking down on press freedom. A case in point was the 2013 trial of Al Jazeera journalists Baher Mohamed, Mohamed Fahmy and Peter Greste, who were accused of supporting the banned Muslim Brotherhood, jailed, tried and then released in two separate presidential pardons. More journalists have been jailed in the past two years than under Hosni Mubarak, who ruled for decades.
Egypt’s military intelligence arrested Hossam Bahgat, an investigative reporter and leading human rights activist in early November. He was questioned over an investigation he published in the local news outlet “Mada Masr” into an alleged secret military trial of 26 army officers, reportedly plotting a coup. He is being charged with “publishing false news that harms national interests and disseminating information that disturbs public peace."
The May 11 edition of Wattan newspaper was seized because of a page-one story headlined “Wattan opens the file of the 'deep state' that threatens Egypt and Sisi: the 7 more powerful than Sisi”. The daily was allowed to hit newsstands after editors changed the headline to “7 stronger than reform?".
TV host Reem Magued’s new TV show “Feminine Plural” discussing social and feminist issues was stopped by orders of authorities in Egypt after only two episodes on ONTV. The government had denied pressure to suspend the show. But Magued, who supported the Jan. 2011 revolution that toppled Mubarak, voluntarily decided to suspend her talk show on ONTV after the 2013 coup.
A new anti-terror law, in force since mid-August, brings in hefty fines of up to $65,000 for journalists who contradict official accounts of terrorist incidents. The law applies to both local and foreign media.
Many Egyptian journalists have gone back to their pre-2011 habits. They have no qualms admitting on air their relationship with the authorities, their vocation to serve them and their sense of duty towards the military, especially television presenters and talk show hosts who continue to be the undisputed leaders of public opinion in a country where illiteracy is high.
In Jordan, journalists and editors who benefitted from a short-lived margin of freedom between 2011 and 2013, say they now know which topics to avoid. The list includes Jordan’s war on ISIS, terror plot trials, and criticism of Arab leaders who fund Amman.
TV anchor Tareq Abu al-Ragheb from the privately-owned satellite channel Al-Haqiqah International, was arrested early November for allegedly posting insulting comments on Facebook. He has been charged with defamation under Jordan’s Cybercrime law.
This came days after the government ruled that defamation charges can be brought against journalists, under the Cybercrime law, bypassing the Press Law, which prevents journalists being imprisoned for press-related violations.
In Yemen continuing unrest makes it a dangerous beat for the press. Over 40 journalists have been abducted by Houthi rebels since they took over much of the country and its media. Journalists require official permission from Houthi officers to leave Yemen if their profession is identified in their passport.
In today’s Tunisia, journalists say the media has never been so free. The government would think twice before telling a journalist what not to write, apparently to avoid a public outcry from an active civil society. But the single largest threat to media today is corruption in the struggling industry itself as most private outlets are owned by members of leading political parties and want-to-be businessmen.
However, journalists, many in need of professional training, continue to be tried under ancient draconian press and penal laws. A draft law on access to public information is awaiting approval by the first elected parliament.
In Bahrain, Zeinab Al Khawaja was sentenced to prison for ripping a picture of King Hamad during a previous court ruling. The latest case is a sign of the government’s continued intolerance of dissent. Bahrain’s pro-opposition newspaper al-Wasat was allowed to resume publishing in August after a two-day ban that drew international criticism. Authorities had accused the paper of “violating the law and repeated dissemination of information that affects national unity”.
Bahrain’s press has been labeled “not free” in both the 2014 and 2015 reports by Freedom House.
In Syria, local and foreign journalists are deliberately being targeted by the regime, ISIS and other militant Jihadi groups.
More than 110 reporters have been killed since March 2011 and more than 80 are currently detained. Under threat from all sides, the Syrian media are fleeing the country in droves. Foreign correspondents rarely travel to Syria. ISIS-controlled areas have become information “black holes” from which little or no news coverage is emerging while several Arab and foreign journalists have been beheaded.
In Lebanon, where newspapers and TV serve as the propaganda outlets for businessmen and politicians, the Syrian crisis has reinforced the polarization between pro-Shiite media and those supporting the Saudi-backed Sunni coalition.
In Libya, freedom of information is under severe threat from the continuing hostilities.
Against this gloomy background, the 8th annual forum of Arab Investigative Journalists opens in Amman on December 4, 2015.
More than 300 Arab journalists, editors and media professors -- out of 1600 trained by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) since 2005 -- will debate growing censorship across the region along with rising disinformation, ignorance and character assassination.
A lot is expected of them. They need – and deserve – your support.
Rana Sabbagh, a career journalist, is ARIJ Executive Director. ARIJ is the region’s leading non for profit organization spreading a culture of investigative reporting inside newsrooms and media faculties in nine Arab states: Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia and Bahrain. It is funded by SIDA, IMS, DANIDA, OSF and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
Topher Sanders
Topher Sanders covers racial inequality for ProPublica. He previously reported on education and city government for The Florida Times-Union. Named to the paper's investigative team in 2013, he became the investigative editor in 2014.
How would you describe your job?
I'm a reporter. And like any reporter in the country, it's my job to question systems, officials and industries. I hold those with power accountable for their decisions and I shine light on corruption, failing bureaucracy and harmful practices.
Have data journalism tools enabled you to better pursue stories on the criminal justice system?
Yes. Data tools allow me to dig into systems and to confirm whether an anecdote is simply an outlier or an example of wider concerns.
Your reporting has revealed hundreds of juveniles in the Jacksonville area took plea deals to avoid being charged as adults. Did this​ reporting begin with data analysis, or did​ interviews lead you to look into the data surrounding the​ issue?
Interviews with lawyers led me to request the data, which hadn't been requested before. Once we found the data supported the lawyers' claims, we then sought out juveniles and families willing to tell their stories.
"I attempt to craft my stories by answering all the questions I can, digging as deep as I can and filling all the holes. If you do that, you put the story (whether it has data or not) in the best position to have impact."
How did you go about putting a human face on a story that involved so much data analysis?
Lots of hours sitting in court listening to how judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers dealt with juveniles. I also developed sources that pointed me in the direction of families who said they had been threatened with adult charges. More families said no than said yes, but that's the nature of this kind of work.
What have you learned from your data reporting projects about how to craft a story to have the greatest impact?
Impact is great when it happens, but it is often based on factors beyond the reporter's control. So the pursuit of impact doesn't drive the crafting of my stories. My desire for impact drives the stories I choose to do, but not necessarily how I do them. I attempt to craft my stories by answering all the questions I can, digging as deep as I can and filling all the holes. If you do that, you put the story (whether it has data or not) in the best position to have impact. Clear and easy to understand writing can also put you in a great position for impact. And that's even more important for a data-heavy story. Readers need to easily understand what you've found and why it matters.
What are your go-to tools/programs when working on a story that involves data? Are there any specific databases that you think are useful for journalists who are just getting into data?
Many of the agencies I've been covering aren't super helpful when it comes to providing data. Shocking, I know. So I've used Tabula and Cometdocs a lot to help turn horrible PDFs into spreadsheets I can work with. School data is great for folks new to data. It tends to be very uniform and allows for reporters to do year-to-year analysis across many variables.
How do you go about confirming that what you see in a data set is an accurate analysis of a situation? Do you have other do's and don’ts for journalists looking to expand their data reporting skills?
Data doesn't replace good reporting. I'm working with a data set now that I thought was great initially, but after doing some reporting, I've learned it's filled with errors and misleading information. So the confirmation process for me involves working my sources to learn if what the data appears to be saying is accurate. My only advice around "do's and don'ts" is that reporters should treat data just like any other claim from a source, document or report. If something in a report looks crazy and inaccurate, you wouldn't just run with it. You'd make some calls and bounce it off your good sources before you'd publish it. Treat data the same way. In fact, even if the information looks great, you still have to report and scrutinize your data. That's the only way you'll be lock-solid and have a great night's sleep before you publish.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Looks like you haven't made a choice yet.
