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For years, the U.S. has pushed education as one of its major triumphs in Afghanistan. The government helped build schools, train teachers, issue textbooks and educate scores of girls. And for years, that legacy went relatively unchecked. But when Azmat Khan of BuzzFeed News began questioning the numbers and visiting schools in the region this year, she found a very different reality. On this episode, Azmat walks us through her reporting into Afghanistan’s "ghost schools."
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 wrote and reported this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
Music in this episode is by Podington Bear and Blear Moon.
Does your newsroom have the data and resources it needs to cover the next big storm? With a little preparation, you can have detailed information on critical infrastructure - like dams and levees - ready to go the next time a hurricane or storm affects your community.
BEFORE THE STORM:
Get to know your data so you’re ready whenever news breaks. Take a look at your city’s emergency preparedness plans, infrastructure and other public safety measures. This way, when something happens, you won’t be dependent on comments from city officials and can quickly add context to your stories.
DATA
National Inventory of Dams (NID) (available from NICAR): Use this data to find out which dams are in your coverage area, how big they are, who owns them, when they were last inspected and whether there is a plan in place for emergencies. Latitude and longitude are included, enabling you to map the dams and look for those closest to populated areas. Follow up with your state dam safety program to try and get the report from the last inspection, and find out whether a dam is considered “high-hazard,” meaning likely to kill at least one person if it fails. Know which dams might be vulnerable in a big storm, and which are likely to have the most impact on residents. Use this NICAR-create guide to reporting on dams.
National Levee Database (NLD) (searchable on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers website): While somewhat incomplete, this website can give you an idea of which levees are in place in your area, when they were last inspected and the rating results from those inspections. Levees, like dams, are critical infrastructure during storms.
TIPSHEETS
Measuring risk: From earthquakes to nuclear plants, how to investigate community preparedness: A reporter offers lessons from a 19-month investigation into the seismic safety of California's schools.
GIS and Tornado Sirens: A reporter walks you through how she used mapping techniques to report on Peoria County's preparedness for tornadoes after one hit South Pekin, a small village near Peoria, IL.
Putting It All Together: Breaking News and Disaster Coverage: Tips for preparing your newsroom to cover a disaster, including data sets to bookmark and resources for localizing your coverage using social media.
DURING THE STORM:
With a little homework, you can offer your audience play-by-play coverage of the storm as well as data- and document-driven reporting. We’ve gathered some tips for doing just that, as well as staying safe when you’re out in the field.
TIPSHEETS
Investigating Breaking News: Tips on how to cover breaking news and websites to keep handy for coverage of a range of topics from aviation accidents to weather.
AUDIO
Lessons from the storm: What we can learn from the Moore, Okla. tornado – Journalists offer tips on reporting navigating the muddied, post-disaster chain of command and filing stories from the field.
EXAMPLES
A Deadly Slope: Examining the Oso, Washington, disaster (Seattle Times, 2014): Just a few days after a deadly landslide, The Seattle Times revealed how there had been a litany of warnings, going back seven decades. The story was the first in a string of exposés, in which The Times merged breaking news with investigative reporting to dissect the state’s worst natural disaster since the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
AFTER THE STORM:
When the worst of the weather is over, it’s time to start looking into how officials responded and if the plans in place worked. You’ll also want to pay attention to disaster relief efforts at a local and national level. Here are some ideas, data sets and resources to get you started.
DATA
Small Business Administration’s Disaster Loans (free for IRE members): These loans are available to businesses and homeowners with property damaged in a federally-declared disaster. Find out how much money was lent out in the wake of the disaster and who got the most. You can easily parse loans to businesses and use the SIC / NAICS code to find out what kind of business it is. For business loans, the data also indicate if the loan was paid in full or charged off. All records include the approval date and amount of the loan.
TIPSHEETS
Data Before and After a Disaster: Learn about different federal programs that provide financial assistance after a natural disaster, where to get their records and how to incorporate them into your stories.
Digging into Profits: IRS form 990: Get ready to check on charities. This tipsheet includes detailed descriptions of some of the more important parts of the form 990, including lines where you'll find useful information.
Documents and tools for investigating nonprofits: This tipsheet provides information for reporters looking to obtain data on non-profit organizations.
Investigating the Aftermath of Disasters: A look at how the South Florida Sun-Sentinel discovered and revealed $530 million in fraud and waste in FEMA disaster aid nationwide.
CAR after the disaster: FEMA, SBA and other data: A guide to investigating the government aid that generally follows large natural disasters.
EXAMPLES
Deathtrap (Oklahoma Watch, 2014): Two schools in an area of Oklahoma what was destroyed by a massive tornado were not properly designed or built, according to several experts to conducted a study for the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Austin Emergency Response Failures (KXAN-Austin, 2014): This series of investigative stories uncovered an overwhelmed 9-1-1 center staff during the deadly “Halloween Flood” of 2013 in Austin, Texas and triggered proposed changes to Austin’s 9-1-1 system
Trashed Trailers (KUSA-Denver, 2014): Contaminated flood waters roared through Northern Colorado mobile home parks in September 2013. A six-month investigation spanning five counties discovered profiteers were sneaking mobile homes into new communities, fixing them up without proper building permits and safety inspections, and marketing them to unsuspecting families.
Landslide safety all over the map in Washington (KUOW and Earth Fix, 2014): The deadly Oso landslide in March sparked a debate over Snohomish County’s apparent failure to protect residents at the base of a known landslide zone. But Washington state is dotted with landslide-prone slopes, and many counties and cities do less than Snohomish County to keep homes away from harm.
Guide compiled by IRE's Lauren Grandestaff, Sarah Hutchins and Liz Lucas
We're excited to announce that IRE is part of a new data journalism internship program being offered by the Dow Jones News Fund.
Dow Jones News Fund has a long history of placing students in internships, through its prestigious News Copy Editing Program and other programs. In this new internship, students who are selected to participate will spend a week in training with the IRE staff at the University of Missouri School of Journalism before joining newsrooms throughout the country to work on data analysis projects.
The full announcement for this new program (and the other internships), with links to apply and for more information, is below. If you have questions about IRE's role, email me at mark@ire.org.
College juniors, seniors and graduate students are invited to apply to the Dow Jones News Fund for paid summer 2016 internships in data journalism, digital media, business reporting and news editing. The application deadline is Nov. 3.
Interns will be trained at New York University, Arizona State University, the University of Missouri, Temple University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Texas, Austin, before reporting to work. Interns will earn at least $400 per week for 10 to 12 weeks. Fifty-six media companies hired 92 interns in 2015.
For the first time, the Fund will offer a data journalism program with training directed by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) at the University of Missouri. Students will learn how to search out, analyze and report with data. More information and an application are available here.
The Fund and sponsoring media cover travel costs to and from training and to newsrooms. Students who return to school after a successful internship will receive $1,000 college scholarships. Applicants must take a one-hour business reporting or editing/digital exam in addition to submitting the application forms. Posters, brochures and tests have been mailed to professors on college campuses who have volunteered to serve as test monitors. (Note: The Fund is using a new application process for 2016, students do not need to create an account on the website.)
A sizable number of 2015 interns have already been hired or offered extended internships. Participating news organizations have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Comcast, Dow Jones Newswires, The Denver Post, Los Angeles Times, Thomson Reuters, Media General, MSN, E.W. Scripps Company, The Detroit News, The Tampa Bay Times,The Christian Science Monitor, the Capital New York, Naples Daily News, TheStreet.com and many others.
The program is open to U.S. students studying abroad. Students with questions can visit the website for details or email djnf@dowjones.com.
It's once again time to enter the Philip Meyer Journalism Award contest. Entries are now being accepted online, through Nov. 20.
Established in 2005, the award was created to honor Philip Meyer's pioneering efforts to utilize social science research methods to foster better journalism. The contest recognizes stories that incorporate survey research, probabilities and other social science tools in creative ways. Three awards are given annually:
Not sure what to enter? Watch award-winning data journalists Jennifer LaFleur, David Donald and Tom Hargrove discuss best practices for great data reporting and stories that previously won the Philip Meyer Awards. To learn more about the contest, go to the Philip Meyer Award FAQ page, or contact IRE's contest coordinator, Lauren Grandestaff at 573-882-6668 or lauren@ire.org.
The deadline for entries is November 20, 2015, 11:59 EST.
A single email from a governor, agency head or low-level bureaucrat can crack open a story, thanks to freedom of information laws.
But if a reporter knows where to look, she can also find a trove of internal documents from some of the world’s biggest corporations, including emails, memos, meeting minutes and even flow charts.
That’s how Mariah Blake, a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University, pieced together “Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia.” Her seven-chapter investigation, assembled over five months and published on Huffington Post Highline, exposed how DuPont poisoned a slice of Appalachia — and how regulators let it happen.
Court documents were Blake’s first stop. Fresh off a series for Mother Jones on BPA-free plastics, she was doing research for a book proposal on the plastics industry’s efforts to undercut potential regulations. In the process, she found a series of lawsuits around C8, a chemical used to make teflon, and the corrosive health problems it casued the people who lived around DuPont's West Virginia chemcial factory.
By the time Blake started reporting, DuPont had already reached a $16.5 million settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency, the largest fine in EPA history, over charges that the company had suppressed internal evidence that C8 was harmful. It also settled an 80,000-person class action lawsuit, and about 3,500 individual liability lawsuits were still pending against the chemicals giant.
Subpoenas from all that litigation yielded hundreds of thousands of internal DuPont documents, including emails from executives and memos from researchers. The plaintiffs’ lawyers attached hundreds of those documents to trial motions, making them public records; Blake got access to the files using PACER. The rest, though, remained out of reach.
The court documents revealed DuPont officials hid evidence that C8 was harmful and concealed its presence in the region’s water supply.
In 1981, after industry data suggested a link between birth defects in rats' eyes and in utero exposure to C8, DuPont began monitoring 50 female factory workers who handled the chemical, Blake wrote. The company took blood samples and had the women fill out questionnaires, telling them it was part of a routine medical exam. Researchers abandoned the study after two of the nine pregnant workers gave birth to children with eye deformities; the rate of birth defects in the general population is about two in 1,000. Less than a year later, the company presented the EPA with different data on C8 that showed no link to deformities.
In 1984, DuPont employees began testing water collected from gas stations near the company’s West Virginia plant. They found C8 in samples from two nearby towns, but the company didn’t notify the public. Executives considered new measures to keep C8 from leeching into the environment, Blake wrote, but they abandoned the idea after concluding it wouldn’t reduce the company’s liability.
“I was just completely blown away” by those documents, Blake said. “They’re just incredibly revealing and incredibly damning.”
Blake wanted to know what was in the other DuPont documents, but without help from the attorneys of the victims — who declined to work with her because their cases were still in court — she wasn’t sure how to get her hands on them. The documents made public during the trial gave her a “very rough sketch,” she said, enough to begin assembling a timeline that stretched decades.
The court documents also helped her scope out sources — a delicate task in a region whose scant economic opportunities have allowed DuPont to amass wide influence.
“A lot of them suspected I worked for DuPont,” Blake said. “They also didn’t want to talk in public places, some of them. They didn’t want to be seen talking with me.”
In private, though, most of them were eager to tell their story to someone who would listen. Many of the people who had led the legal fight against DuPont faced backlash from the community; friends stopped talking to them, Blake wrote, and one family’s house was littered with water bottles carrying homemade “C8” labels.
“Everybody had a connection to DuPont,” Blake said. “And many of them, even those who had been hurt by the company, felt very loyal to the company.”
One man, whose mother was pregnant when DuPont assigned her to funnel C8 waste into storage pits, didn't blame the company for being born with half a nose and a misshapen eye — until he attended a town hall on the class-action lawsuit against DuPont, where he met others suffering from health problems. Another man, who tested C8 in the 1980s, had to have his colon removed. Still, he considered himself lucky, Blake wrote. He’s the only C8 tester who’s still alive.
It wasn’t until Blake asked around among her sources — and after her editor had started asking for drafts — that she realized she might find the rest of DuPont’s subpoenaed documents at the EPA, still on file from the record-setting settlement case. She checked, and there they were: more than 4,000 pages, all public records.
Some of the files were available online. But to get the full picture, she had to travel to the EPA Docket Center’s reading room in Washington, D.C. She spent days there, sorting through files whose numbers didn’t match, looking for names that had sometimes changed
That process was made infinitely easier, Blake said, by soliciting the help of the docket center’s staff. One of the women who worked there remembered an old name for C8, which helped her track down more files.
“It was only because she had a recollection of the case, from having been there a long time, that she was able to find the documents,” Blake said. “If it weren’t for them being as helpful as they were, I would not have been able to locate the documents.”
Although the story’s broad contours were already sketched out in the court filings, the EPA documents added some important texture, Blake said. For instance, she discovered DuPont had hired the the Weinberg Group, the consultants that tobacco companies had used to cast doubt on medical evidence of smoking’s harms, to do the same thing with C8. “I only got the documents to prove that at the very last minute,” she said.
Ultimately, Blake said, her story was feasible because it was retrospective. It wouldn’t have been possible without the documents gleaned from the legal process.
“These attorneys have done this incredible work, they spent the last 16 years piecing together this story out of millions of pages of documents,” she said. They “had really taken advantage of the public docket system to put other documents, that wouldn’t have otherwise been in the public record, into the public record.”
Now that the story’s published, Blake said, it’s like the community has awakened to what was always in their midst.
“That’s the part of this that’s been most rewarding to me, that it’s changing the dynamics in the community and the people who had been shunned for standing up to DuPont are now being recognized.”
As part of the lawsuit settlement, DuPont agreed to clean up water supplies where C8 contamination met a certain threshold. The company also funded a $30 million study of C8’s health effects in people, which in 2012 linked the chemical to six illnesses: testicular cancer, thyroid disease, kidney cancer, ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, and pregnancy-induced hypertension, which can lead to other long-term problems for the mother and child. Thousands of people living around DuPont’s West Virginia chemical plant claim they suffer from at least one of those conditions, and they're suing DuPont to recover damages. Some blame the chemical for even more diseases.
It can be difficult to get people interested in chemical regulations, Blake said. This story illustrates what’s at stake.
An analysis of blood banks across the globe has revealed C8 in nearly all samples, Blake wrote. The sole exception is an archived sample of blood taken from Korean War veterans before 1952.
DuPont voluntarily phased out C8 in 2015, replacing it with perfluorohexanoic acid — also known as C6. Researchers have tested worms unearthed around DuPont’s plant and found similar compounds, like C5, C6, C7, C9 and C10.
“The thing that really, really struck me when I was reporting this story was how many factors had to align in order for DuPont to be held somewhat accountable,” she said. “I mean, in the end they might not be held accountable. But that is very much a result of the way we regulate toxic chemicals in this country.”
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.
What happens to immigrants convicted of sex crimes? The answer, Maria Sacchetti found out, is often unsettling. Her investigation for the Boston Globe revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was quietly releasing violent offenders back into the U.S. when their home countries wouldn’t take them. On this episode, Sacchetti talks about the reporting process – including a lawsuit that forced ICE to give up the names of released criminals.
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 wrote and produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
Music in this episode is by Podington Bear.
With students across the country heading back to campus, we thought it was time to take a behind-the-scenes look at a student investigation. This week we’re talking to Megan Jula, a journalism student at Indiana University, about her reporting on the school’s mental health care services. Megan found that Indiana (and many other large public universities) wasn’t meeting nationally recommended student-to-counselor ratios, resulting in scheduling delays that put students at risk.
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.
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
Shelby Mann reported this episode. Aaron Pellish wrote the script. The episode was voiced and produced by Shawn Shinneman. IRE web editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
Music in this episode is by Podington Bear and Broke For Free.
Armand Emamdjomeh
Armand Emamdjomeh is a data reporter at the Los Angeles Times. While at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, he helped to launch Mission Local, a community news site covering San Francisco's Mission District. In a previous life, he worked for international disaster relief and development agencies. Our interview follows.
How would you describe your job?
I'd say it's pretty open-ended. We all have a few basic responsibilities on the Data Desk and have mini-beats we cover. While I oversee the Homicide Report site and Quakebot (our earthquake monitoring and story-writing robot), I also tend to work on anything involving transportation safety, since I've spent a lot of time learning how to analyze California's SWITRS database of road accidents.
That said, if I have a compelling story or viz idea outside of those areas, I'm usually completely able to work on them. The only real constraint is time.
How did you learn how to code and start creating interactive designs?
I took a basic HTML/CSS class in j-school which started me down the rabbit hole, but I pretty much learned on the job. I was hired at the LAT as sort of an on-demand hacker/uber-producer, so it was a lot of "we need a video/Twitter/something widget five minutes ago, go!" You tend to learn pretty quickly in those sorts of situations.
After a while our editor Megan Garvey had me use my HTML/CSS skills to produce what we now call our "Big Builds," which are basically hand-crafted story templates, and from there I started doing some basic data visualizations, which is how I learned JavaScript and basic data manipulation using JSON and CSVs.
I usually set a goal of learning something new with every project. For example, in one project I'll try to use web scraping in Python, in another I'll try to use a JavaScript SVG library that isn't D3, or drawing custom items on Leaflet maps, and so on.
It's great to be able to dive deep into a library that you've considered magic for so long and realize, "Oh. So this is how it works."
At what point in the story process are you brought on to create the visualizations? Do you also get to pitch stories that you find compelling?
We're always open to compelling pitches at the L.A. Times, we're very flexible in that respect. For example, as a producer on the website, I shot and edited videos and worked on a "Column One" story. Likewise, on the Data Desk, I can develop the idea for and begin reporting out a story. These are among the best situations, because I can start thinking about the visualization and online presentation from the very beginning. Our recent story on pedestrian accidents, bicycle hit-and-run piece, and pro athletes filing for workers compensation stories are good examples.
As for when I'm brought in to create visualizations, it depends. Sometimes, it might be something we need to crank out over a day or two because it's for a daily or weekly column, and other times we'll typically have a few weeks or so. I try to build my own relationships with reporters in the newsroom, so a few folks will come to me and say, "I'm working on this story, so what are some of the ideas that you would have for a visualization angle?"
You don't want to be in a situation where you see a story run that you could have done something great for, so clear lines of newsroom communication are essential.
What was one of the most memorable stories you've worked on so far, and what made it interesting?
There've been a few. One of my all-time favorites is an interactive for a story on the first satellite in geosynchronous Earth orbit. It wasn't a huge story, but it was a really fun viz, because I got to learn how to use the three.js JavaScript library, used for creating 3-D interactives, and who doesn't love plotting things in space? I've never really gotten to use three.js again since then, though I'm keeping my eye out for opportunities.
Another favorite is "Finding Marlowe," a story by Daniel Miller on Samuel Marlowe, L.A.'s first licensed black private detective, who may have been a major influence on noir writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. While not a technically complex piece, we had a lot of fun making the presentation. My colleague Lily Mihalik tracked down an illustrator who came up with these great animated illustrations that really gave the piece the flavor of 1930's L.A noir. We had fun making the piece, and I think it comes through in the final presentation.
Overall though, I think I'm most fond of our pedestrian accidents story, both because of the subject matter, and how much I learned in the project - from data process and analysis to custom mapping in Leaflet and QGIS. It's great to be able to dive deep into a library (Leaflet in this case) that you've considered magic for so long and realize "Oh. So *this* is how it works."
When you come across problems with the data in a project after it gets published, how do you go about fixing the problem?
Usually, we'll have to post a correction of some sort. Which makes things tricky because at some point it's nearly impossible to ensure 100 percent accuracy in a massive dataset. For example, with the pedestrians story, we realized after a reader wrote in that somehow the Bing geocoder we used had located several intersections exactly 200 blocks south of where they were supposed to be - Western and 48th was located at Western and 248th, Western and 46th was at 246th, and so on.
It was a bummer to post a correction on a story we'd worked on for so long, but it was also humbling and a reality check. That's the risk of dealing with many, many points of data - there are many, many things that can go wrong.
What would you say are the key things to keep in mind when working on a big project like your latest story on the dangerous intersections in LA?
Document everything. You don't want to be trying to confirm a number that you have no idea where it came from. One of the things I like most about working in Django is that everything can be walked back through the views and models to the beginning of the data, and the nature of Python encourages readability and good documentation practices.
Using a version manager like GitHub also helps with this. Nothing annoys me more than seeing a bunch of files named something like "xxxx_final_REALLYFINAL_new_credits.csv". With version control, you can just overwrite the old file. Later on, if you find you need something you worked on earlier, you can just walk back to that stage in the project.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
By Allison Wrabel
Reporting on sexual assault has been a topic of discussion in recent years, lately in regard to assaults on college campuses. Speakers participating in a panel at the 2015 IRE Conference discussed best practices for talking to victims, corroborating stories and striking an emotional balance.
Sheila S. Coronel, dean of academic affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, authored a report on Rolling Stone’s investigation into an alleged rape at the University of Virginia. She gave reporters tips on how to avoid reporting risks.
Sometimes, sources aren’t ready to tell their stories to reporters. Nicole Noren, a producer for ESPN's Enterprise and Investigative Unit, talked about how working with sources requires collaboration. It takes time to gain the trust of the victims/survivors.
Elana Newman, a professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa and Research Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, encouraged reporters to keep covering sexual assault and the stories of trauma survivors. The most important thing is to get the story right, she said. But it’s also important to be clear when explaining your reporting process to the victims. Newman said that sometimes trauma survivors’ stories can be inconsistent because of the way memories work.
This week we're taking a look at a joint investigation between The Marshall Project and NPR. The two teamed up to look at what happens when prisoners go straight from solitary confinement back to the streets. Reporters Christie Thompson and Joseph Shapiro will discuss how they worked through common prison reporting roadblocks.
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.
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
Shawn Shinneman reported this episode. Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast. Music in this episode is by Podington Bear.
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