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Preparing a fall syllabus for a college journalism course? Consider teaching your class the basics of data journalism using spreadsheets. We have all the lessons and data you need to introduce your students to Excel and working with data through NICAR Courses.
“I have used this course pack in a digital journalism foundations class, and it is terrific," said John Wihbey, who used the course packs at Boston University. "The materials are well-organized, and the examples really helped the students grasp the concepts and learn how to analyze data quickly and accurately. I’d recommend it even to teachers unfamiliar with Excel and data. It makes for an excellent two-week unit.”
By Allison Wrabel
Cole County Circuit Court Judge Jon Beetem ruled that the Missouri Department of Corrections violated the Sunshine Law when it failed to reveal the name of the pharmacy that supplies the drugs for lethal injections.
Under state law, the identities of individual execution team members are to be kept confidential. In 2013, the department added a compounding pharmacy to the team.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and reporter Chris McDaniel, formerly of St. Louis Public Radio and now at Buzzfeed, sued the state in May 2014 after they were denied requests for records about the laboratories and pharmacies.
Judge Beetem said the law does not allow the department to "define the execution team as it wishes, without limitation." The law says the execution team is limited to "persons who administer lethal gas or chemicals" and "persons who provide direct support for the administration of lethal gas or chemicals." The court concluded that pharmacies and laboratories are entities, not "persons." In addition, the pharmacies and laboratories are not "administering," or providing "direct support for the administration."
Last week, Judge Beetem ruled in a similar suit filed by former state lawmaker Joan Bray that the department violated the Sunshine Law. A pending third suit filed by other media companies asked a judge to order the Department of Corrections to make public where it purchases drugs for executions and disclose details about the composition and quality of the drugs.
How do you earn the trust of a source like Edward Snowden? Or the former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden? On this bonus episode of the podcast we’ll hear from someone who did just that. Earlier this year documentarian Laura Poitras spoke with Toronto Star reporter Robert Cribb at the 2015 IRE Conference. In the three clips you’re about to hear, Poitras discusses each of her films: "My Country, My Country," "The Oath" and "Citizenfour." She’ll talk about getting access, capturing candid moments and more.
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.
- My Country, My Country (2006)
- The Oath (2010)
- Citizenfour (2014)
Music in this episode is by Alex Fitch and Podington Bear. This episode was produced by Shawn Shinneman and edited by Sarah Hutchins.
**This article appeared in the Winter 2012 IRE Journal**
By Martha Mendoza, The Associated Press
My freedom of information lesson at The Associated Press Mexico City bureau was not going well.
Everyone kept inexplicably cracking up.
MISTAKE #1. It ends up that "FOIA" sounds remarkably close to a vulgar f-word in Spanish.
Also, because Mexico actually has a very effective freedom of information law, I was neither impressing nor informing anyone with my high-minded lecture.
Well, what about other countries? I wondered.
A quick count found 105 countries with legal promises of transparency, either FOI laws or constitutional provisions, most introduced in the past five or six years. Transparency is now being tied to foreign aid, and there are strong grassroots movements, boosted by WikiLeaks revelations, pressing for it as well. By the end of 2010, governments had made access to information a legal right for 85 percent of people in the world.
"So ... let's hold them accountable!" I pitched to my editors.
It was a wild idea, the first worldwide test of FOI. But AP is a strong advocate for freedom of information, and its reporters in the U.S. routinely use right-to-know laws. With professional journalists all around the world, we were perfectly positioned to pull this off.
John Daniszewski, AP's vice president and senior managing editor for international news, was enthusiastic, with consummately cheerful International Enterprise Editor Mary Rajkumar taking on the heavy lifting.
She had no clue.
I had no clue.
What happened next was overwhelming, exhilarating and in the end extremely rewarding. It was more time-consuming and complicated than we had anticipated, eventually involving more than 140 AP journalists, some for weeks at a time. Don't try this alone.
We started by brainstorming: What to request? We conferred with regional editors, who turned to reporters around the world. I also grilled everyone from my running partner and my kids to university professors and policy makers in medicine, criminal justice and environmental issues.
1. Any documents, memos, reports or other records that would show how many people had been arrested and how many convicted each year for the past 10 years under antiterrorism laws.
2. Any documents, memos, reports or other records that would show how many people had been detained without arrest each year for the past 10 years for ties to terrorism.
3. Any documents, memos, reports or other records that would show the current status of people convicted and the sections and subsections of crime under which they had been convicted under antiterrorism laws during the past 10 years.
4. Any documents, memos, reports or other records that would show the nationality of those arrested and convicted under anti-terrorism laws during the past 10 years.
5. Any documents, memos, reports or other records that would show the names, dates and circumstances of people arrested under anti-terrorism laws for the past 10 years.
6. Any audits, surveys or studies of anti-terrorism published in the last 10 years.
MISTAKE #2: If I had spent more time brainstorming, our questions would have been more streamlined and clear. I set up one-time chats with experts, where I explained what we were doing in an email and then asked them if they had any ideas. In hindsight, I should have followed up a week later, sharing our ideas and allowing theirs to percolate.
Within a few weeks we had an aha moment. The 10-year anniversary of 9/11 was approaching. Why not take the first look at the impact of the global war on terror? Until then, no one had tracked how many people had been arrested - and how many convicted - as terrorists in the past decade, when almost every country had adopted terrorism legislation.
We framed our questions, consulting with FOI experts and researchers who had written extensively on government transparency. Our greatest asset was AP's own FOI lawyer, Karen Kaiser, with whom we narrowed down exactly what to ask for, troubleshooting for possible pitfalls that could result in rejections or stonewalling.
Regional editors in London, Cairo, Bangkok and Mexico City identified country-by-country which of AP's 3,000 reporters would work with us. We asked these reporters to describe how to file a FOI request in their countries and to figure out which agencies would have information and data about terrorism prosecutions. This was more than just prep work: in the end, we were able to publish country-by-country guides on how to file FOI requests.
Our News Information Research Center built a Sharepoint site where we listed countries, editors, reporters, the year FOI was adopted, links to laws and more details. (Sharepoint is great software for collaborating with colleagues on projects. It creates a password-protected website where all members can post and manage documents, add to spreadsheets and share information.) This proved to be invaluable as a central place for gathering all information and building our spreadsheets.
MISTAKE #3. I gave reporters the option of entering their information in Sharepoint or sending me the information. Unfamiliar with the software, incredibly busy with breaking news and in some cases unsteady with English, most colleagues opted to send everything straight to me. I missed a teaching opportunity and bogged myself down with uploading data.
During the last week of January AP reporters around the world requested answers to the same six questions in 105 countries and the European Union. We hand-delivered letters in Liberia, logged into a website in Mexico, picked up the phone in Portugal and sent a certified letter in Japan. A few hiccups: Some countries require requesters first to try to get the information without a legal FOI request, and some countries require requesters to be citizens.
MISTAKE #4. In some countries, the requests went to just one agency; in others they went to more than six. Our spreadsheet didn't break down a country agency by agency, so if one agency responded but others didn't, a country was still marked as "responsive."
With FOls filed, we began looking for people behind the numbers. But the data from the FOI responses was arriving in a trickle. Surprisingly, the quickest and most responsive governments tended to be in smaller, less-developed countries like Guatemala and Georgia. In one country after another, officials begged off, saying there was no way to provide the information we sought. But AP reporters kept pressing. In Uganda, for example, the director of anti-terrorism, the spokesman of the judiciary and the police spokesman all said they had no figures, but our stringer found the data with a court clerk in Kampala. In Pakistan, a police inspector earning his doctorate in criminal justice pointed me to the data.
To fill in the blanks, we interviewed convicted terrorists, victims and prosecutors. I surveyed local crime data and government repositories and dug through reports at the U.N. and U.S. State Department. The Statistical Assessment Service at George Mason University (http://stats.org) reviewed our data and gave advice about how to analyze, compare, spot trends and avoid misinterpreting the numbers.
We built several databases. One of them showed country-by-country how many people had been arrested and how many convicted of terrorism year by year. A second database focused on how many days it took for responses and in what category the responses fit (i.e. useful, non-responsive, etc.). Other columns included how many days each country allowed for a response and how late each country was. We would eventually publish all of this on DocumentCloud.
MISTAKE #5. Iviany countries responded with an acknowledgment of receipt of our questions and nothing more, I was categorizing these countries in a self-made methodology that didn't allow for this response, it turned out this wheel had been invented: Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheCovernment.org, shared the standardized response categories used by most EOi researchers, and we shifted ours to those.
On Sept. 4, 2011, we published the first part, "Convicted for Terror." We reported that in the first tally of global terror prosecutions ever done, at least 35,000 people had been convicted and almost 120,000 arrested as terrorists over the preceding decade. And while some had bombed hotels or blew up buses, others had been thrown into jail for waving a sign or blogging about a protest.
Two months later we published "Access Denied," in which we reported that in the first worldwide test of freedom of information laws, we found that more than half the countries with such laws do not follow them. New democracies are better at responding than older ones - including the United States, which responded late and only partially.
MISTAKE #6. We didn't brand the package well enough at first. Part one went out with about a dozen sidebars but no indication to readers that they had anything to do with each other. When part two was published two months later, we finally put them all in one place.
There were several unusual aspects to this project. For the first time, AP made a Facebook page (http://on.fb.me/rVJli6) for the project, which put everything in one place - stories, interactives, photos, video and more. We also made every document from every country available on DocumentCloud, along with our request letters, spreadsheets and methodology.
We compiled the first centralized website for people around the world to find a link to their own FOI legislation (http://apne.ws/ S4CLOG), including an explanation of how to file a request. And we invited readers to join in the conversation by suggesting what the AP might want to request next via FOI in any country. Satbir Sharma holds up a government Right to Information response regarding an embezzlement scheme in his village, Chandrawal, India. The Sharmas say that his wife was killed and his father's leg broken after they filed a corruption case.
The projects ran on dozens of front pages and were featured on thousands of websites. We had thousands of responses to the stories online.
The British House of Commons Library made an urgent request for the entire terrorism package, saying AP's decision to post ail its data "has been very helpful." The State Department and the U.N. also requested all of the material.
Henri-Christin Longendja, who directs Congo's Committee for Human Rights and Development, said AP's findings were helping his campaign to push parliament to vote for open government: "This is what we need to help."
In the end, well ... actually, we've decided to keep going. So many great suggestions came to our Facebook site that we're going ahead and making requests on behalf of those readers. We're testing Nigeria's new law, as suggested. And we're even looking at some of the slightly offbeat suggestions, like the one from a reader who asked us to find out what really happened to Marilyn Monroe.
We're going for it, appealing the exemptions on the FBI's heavily redacted file to get to the bottom of the Marilyn Monroe mystery. What the FOIA!
Martha Mendoza is a national writer for The Associated Press.
**This article appeared in the Fall 2014 IRE Journal**
By David Cuillier, University of Arizona School of Journalism
When it comes to freedom of information, the United States can learn a lot from other countries.
Now, 103 countries have freedom of information laws, most of those passed in the last 15 years. Many were modeled after the 1966 U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but have since leapt far ahead.
In ranking the strength of FOI laws, Access Info Europe and the Centre for Law and Democracy place the United States at No. 44 in the world. That’s behind such countries as Uganda, Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Mexico’s law ranks seventh.
Sure, there is more to accessing public records than just the law. A state or nation can have a strong law but weak implementation. Or, a country can have a weak law but the culture and political leadership might foster openness.
The fact is, though, laws do matter, and the U.S. is falling behind. We are driving a 1966 Ford Mustang of a law. A classic car, no doubt, but with worse reliability, horse power, sound system, AC, safety and comfort than a new Jaguar SE (the United Kingdom’s FOI law, passed in 2000, ranks 29th).
So what can we learn from our global neighbors — even those with some pretty sketchy records on press freedom? A lot.
Of course, just as there are some good FOI laws in the world, there are a lot of bad ones. In Bangladesh and Ghana you have to hand deliver your request. The United Kingdom FOI gives the Royal Family a broad exemption. Many nations still have no laws requiring government to provide records. The reality is there is a lot of good and bad in all FOI laws, particularly at the state level. It’s easy to get complacent and accustomed to our laws — to accept them as they are, shrug and move on. We should not. We should look around the world, identify the best practices internationally and craft a more powerful FOIA that will better serve journalists, citizens and democracy in the 21st century. It’s time we park that Mustang in the garage. It’s time to trade up.
David Cuillier is director of the University of Arizona School of Journalism and Freedom of Information Committee chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. He is co-author, with Charles Davis, of “The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records.”
**This article appeared in the 2015 1st Quarter IRE Journal**
BY EMILIA DÍAZ-STRUCK » CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF VENEZUELA
The lack of information in one country does not mean that the information does not exist. Many times, stories connect with different parts of the world, and searching in other countries could improve the findings. Persons and companies can have investments and lawsuits in different countries, global partnerships as well as cross-border connections. Records, court files and other documents can be found. If they are not available online, it is time to think of crossing borders in a different way and do freedom of information (FOI) requests in other countries.
There are several steps that can be helpful when you decide to include cross-border FOI requests as part of your reporting:
When you start an investigation, do not forget to check its crossborder connections. Often, these connections can come from investments or people’s backgrounds. Just think for a moment if your story includes persons or companies that could have a past or a present in different countries. If so, check online and start planning. FOI requests take time, and in almost every country the legal framework establishes the amount of time it should take to answer a request.
Planning also means knowing what kind of information you are searching for, in which format it can be found and in which countries the information could be available.
Before doing any information request, verify that it is not available online. Sometimes governments and institutions in different countries have their own search systems for public records. Documents can also be found as PDFs in different languages. It is useful to dig thoroughly online before deciding to continue the FOI adventure.
A key step before doing a FOI request in any country is to know the legal framework. Many countries in the world have FOI laws. These laws openly establish how the process works in each country: how to address the request, if it is possible to do the request online through a website, if it needs to be sent to a specific institution or if it actually needs to be sent on paper. This varies from country to country.
To check the legal frameworks established in various countries, you can find resources complied by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) (bit.ly/1yHadEa), including links to freedominfo.org, Access Info-Europe, Right2Info and other organizations around the world that provide manuals and specific information about the laws in various countries or regions.
If you do not find all the information you need on those websites, you can look at local ones. To do this, it is useful to do advanced searches to find the legal framework of the country where the FOI request is going to be done.
If the country does not have an explicit FOI law, you might still be able to request the information. Some countries that do not have FOI laws address public information requests in other laws. For example, you may find it in specific articles of a country’s constitution, which can be quoted while making your request.
In Venezuela, for example, there is no FOI law, but the right is granted through the Constitution. There are four articles that mention that any person has the right to request information to the authorities and the right of free speech, among others. To request public information, a person can write a letter quoting these articles.
It can be useful to get advice from lawyers, colleagues and organizations in countries with no FOI law. They can say if there is any legislation that can support a request, or if not, how information can be requested.
Not everything can be requested and found in English. More than 60 countries have made English their official language, but others have French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Italian, Chinese, Russian, among others, as their official language. This means that some institutions where the official language is not English could be reluctant to answer FOI requests submitted in English. Sometimes you are more likely to get an answer when the request is sent in the country’s official language. If you do not speak the language, ask for help.
After deciding in what language the request is best written, it is also important to understand the country’s culture. Some countries are more formal than others. Some countries will not differentiate between requests from foreigners and nationals; some might be more likely to respond to their nationals, and others to foreign media. It is useful to understand how this works in the country where you need to do the FOI request.
When you submit the request, you should send it to the right person. Contacting the wrong person could mean never getting an answer. Each country has its own governmental structure and each institution has its own organizational chart. While establishing what information or document you are going to ask for in your FOI request, you will need to know the person inside the institution who should have the information and will be in charge of answering the request.
However, in some countries, only a few people are authorized to talk or answer any request made to an institution. It is important to know whether this is the case, and then address the letter to the head of the organization. Otherwise, the answer you might receive — if you receive any — will be: “I’m not authorized to respond your request. You should send it to …” This restarts the process and more time will be needed to get a positive answer.
A good way to do better FOI requests in other countries is to find a colleague or an organization that works in the country where you are planning the requests. There are special organizations around the world that promote the right to access public information and that have experience doing FOI requests. They are usually open to giving advice on the best ways to do FOI requests in that country, how to write them and how to follow up.
Colleagues in other countries are also a good way to improve the requests. They are used to the country’s culture, the best way to reach organizations or institutions, the time it takes and how to follow up the requests. They also speak the country’s official language, know the legal framework and have probably done FOI requests for their own journalistic pieces. It is useful to contact a colleague, explain what you are doing and ask for their help.
If you do not know a journalist in the country you would like to do the request, you can ask for a reference from organizations like IRE, GIJN, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) and the Press and Society Institute (IPYS), among others.
Besides asking for advice, directly involving a colleague in another country in the project also can be useful. If the story has connections in a different country, the possibilities to find more information, access more data, understand the story better and do successful FOI requests could increase when someone from the country is involved in the project. To do this, when you reach your colleague, you can propose the possibility of publishing the angle of their country in their own publication on the same day you will be publishing your story.
A colleague from that other country would know if it is better if a local does the request or if you as a foreigner can do it. The colleague will be the right person to tell you the best way to reach public institutions with FOI requests. And if the agency prefers to respond to nationals, then as your partner in the project, your colleague will be happy to help you with the request. Of course, you should also be helpful with your colleague’s questions and should be willing to share. This will embrace the cross-border spirit of collaboration.
With every FOI request, it is important to know:
While writing your request, do not forget to include your contact information. If there is no online platform to send the request and you decide to partner with another colleague in a different country, remember that when your partner goes to the public office to leave the request, the office should stamp and date a copy of your request to prove that it was received.
Once the FOI request is submitted, the countdown starts. You should write in your calendar when you should expect an answer according to the time limits established in the legislation. It is useful to do follow-ups to confirm that the request was received and to check on its status. If time passes and the day you were supposed to receive an answer comes with no answer, you can send a second request.
If the response to your request does not come with the right information, or if the request is denied, another request can be sent and the process will start again. If you are going to send another letter, remember to be as specific as possible with your request and send it to the right person. You can always mention the outcome of the request in your final story, even when you do not get a positive one or you did not receive a final answer. It will show that you tried to find more answers and information for your piece.
When you cooperate and get help from an organization or a colleague, do not forget to thank them for all their efforts. Remember to give proper credit, and respect the agreements you made when you started working together on the story. It is always nice to hear a “thank you” from your working partners!
Emilia Díaz-Struck is ICIJ’s research editor. She is a professor of journalism at the Central University of Venezuela and co-founder of the Venezuelan news website Armando.info. Diaz-Struck has been a contributor for The Washington Post and has also written for the magazine Poder y Negocios and Venezuelan newspapers El Universal and El Mundo.
Joanna Lin
Joanna Lin is a data reporter for The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). Previously, Joanna helped launch FairWarning, a nonprofit online publication covering safety, health, and related issues of corporate and government accountability. She reported for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and Los Angeles Times, where she covered breaking news, religion and legal affairs for the metro and national desks. She also covered public health issues for California Watch.
How did you get into data journalism? Was there a moment when you realized that working with data would be important in your career?
I got into data journalism really by necessity. When I was a reporter at CIR's California Watch project, I often wanted to write stories using census data and would have a miserable time trying to figure out things like how many cities had certain types of people. I would open up spreadsheets and basically try to count the number of cells that met what I was looking for by eyeballing them – a tedious, error-prone process! I knew I needed a better way to do these stories. I was fortunate to work with the very knowledgeable and generous Agustin Armendariz, who is now at The New York Times, and he taught me basic functions in Excel. He and my editor at the time, Mark Katches, suggested I go to CAR boot camp. I went and came back evangelized.
In addition to giving me technical experience, working with data has allowed me to report and imagine stories that would otherwise be impossible – or, at the very least, be so impractical that I would never do them. It has also taught me more precise ways of thinking. That's been important in all the reporting I do – and in life in general. I got married last year and used spreadsheets and pivot tables for all my wedding planning!
What are your go-to tools / programs when working on a story that involves data?
I am always encountering new problems that require learning new tools! I write all my code in Sublime Text. I use Google spreadsheets a lot to track data- and document-heavy projects – what I have, what I need to do next. I use csvkit often to clean files. I use Postgres for data analysis and run queries on Navicat. I use Python to help me run repetitive tasks like loading and dumping a database over and over again, scraping a regularly updated spreadsheet or parsing thousands of names. I recently started learning Django so I can house a project that involves entering and connecting a lot of data. There are also tools that I don't need often but am always grateful for when I do, like Cometdocs and regular expressions.
How do you get from an idea to a data journalism story? How do you find relevant data?
"Working with data has allowed me to report and imagine stories that would otherwise be impossible – or, at the very least, be so impractical that I would never do them."
At CIR we focus on stories that almost always involve systemic problems. We think about how and when problems can be measured. Is it when someone enrolls in a public program? Files an annual report? Sells a product or gets inspected? We look for who is involved at each stage of a potential problem and what information they gather. The data doesn't always look like "data" that's ready for you to analyze; it could be in paper forms or emails, or it could come from different sources in different formats, and it could have no numbers at all. We often have to organize information into data.
What do you think is a good way to integrate data with stories?
Data is like any other source in your reporting – a human you might speak to or a document you might read. Sometimes a source gives you background information or directs you to other sources to further your reporting. Sometimes a source gives you great quotes that highlight or contextualize a problem. Data can do all the same things, so integrate data in your stories like you would any good source.
What’s your advice for newbie data journos? Do you have specific dos and don’ts?
Do: Meticulously document your data work! Would you go to an interview without recording or taking notes, and then expect to remember everything afterward? The same goes for your data. I write notes for myself like I'm leaving instructions for a stranger who needs to recreate what I did from scratch.
Don't: Feel that you need to be part of an official newsroom data desk to be a data journalist. There are always opportunities for you to use data in your reporting. Working with data regularly, even just a little bit, also helps you maintain your skills and learn new ones.
NICAR Database Library student Jinghong Chen interviewed Lin.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
**This article appeared in the 2015 1st Quarter IRE Journal**
BY CELESTE GONZÁLEZ DE BUSTAMANTE » BORDER JOURNALISM NETWORK
Geopolitical borders and the communities that thrive among them are unique places where cultures can be both connected and contested at the same time. Borderlanders, those who live on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border region, share hybrid histories irrespective of what is happening in their political centers. The borderlands also are a place of innumerable untold stories waiting to be written, captured on video or produced for the Web. With America’s heightened focus on the U.S.-Mexico border and politicians’ calls to “secure it,” it might be time to ask, how can journalists get better stories about the border, and why should they improve their coverage of it? Here are 10 tips:
The first thing journalists can do is to recognize that all border stories are transnational.
The economies and cultures of the border straddle both sides. If you write a story about a cross-national drug tunnel, it is at first glance a cross-border story, but there are a myriad of other issues and stories that might not be so obvious.
The borderlands are a cultural laboratory where people learn to coexist and adapt. A recent report by Dallas Morning News reporter Alfredo Corchado about African-American expats living in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, (bit.ly/1E7g83z) illustrated another side of the border — one that does not fit neatly into the trope of “people who head north for a better life.” Sometimes, as Corchado’s story points out, people travel south, and for a variety of reasons.
Economically speaking, cross-border communities are inextricably linked. According to a 2013 report by University of Arizona economists, the Nogales, Arizona, fresh produce industry, which links Mexican produce to U.S. consumers, had contributed a three-year annual average of $436.7 million to the Santa Cruz County, Arizona, economy (bit.ly/1wwlkk4). In Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Marosi’s recent series, “Product of Mexico,” Marosi made public the contrast between deplorable living conditions of Mexican farm workers and their workplaces, which were described as “immaculate greenhouses” where “laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce” (bit.ly/1yY15sY).
Reporters won’t get far if they step onto the border and begin to interview its inhabitants without considering that the north side was originally part of the Spanish empire. Also, reporters should also know that prior to 1848, the north side of the border was still a part of Mexico, except in the case of Arizona and New Mexico, which were acquired by the U.S. a few years later as part of the Gadsden Purchase in 1854.
“Ringside Seat to a Revolution,” David Dorado Romo’s microhistory of El Paso, Texas, and Juárez (bit.ly/1GtWz8c), is a fascinating cultural examination of the turn-of-the-19th-century border community, and it provides deep background and an important backdrop to many relevant and contemporary issues.
Journalists can go beyond knowing about the general history of the borderlands and include history in their work, and in so doing can increase the quality of their reporting. They can visit and consult local historical societies and university archives along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Many of these resources are now online. One such resource is an online digital archive based at the University of Arizona, which houses Mexican and Mexican-American newspapers published from the mid-1800s to the 1970s (bit.ly/1Mtbwtf).
There are numerous indigenous nations whose tribal lands straddle both sides of the border. Each native people has their own rich history, which if included, could add a valuable dimension to reporting projects. The photo above of members of the Yaqui Indian Nation was acquired at the University of Arizona Special Collections, home to numerous online photo collections.
The historian’s craft is similar to the journalist’s, though the former has the luxury of time to investigate projects. Nevertheless, studying the work of scholars, such as Elaine Carey’s “Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime” (bit.ly/1t0hLAz), might be useful in finding leads for stories and for triggering ideas about what to report.
No two border cities are the same: What happens in San Diego, California/Tijuana, Baja California, is different from Nogales, Arizona/Nogales, Sonora (Ambos Nogales), and those places are distinct from El Paso/Juárez, and so on. Each trans-border community has its own culture and history. The diversity of the U.S.-Mexico border lends itself to excellent cross-border and border-wide projects. Journalists can embrace the diversity and look for projects that examine and compare everything from environmental issues, such as water and climate change, to political and economic issues.
InSight Crime reported that as many as 2,000 guns per day are trafficked into Mexico from the U.S. (bit.ly/1HGPX7F). With that many weapons crossing the border, there’s bound to be some violence. But violence, like migration patterns, changes frequently. Currently, the situation in parts of Tamaulipas, for example, is much more dangerous than the situation in the cities of Baja California or Sonora. Checking sites such as InSight Crime can be useful in determining whether it’s worth crossing the border at a given time.
Speaking of dangers along the border, journalists should recognize that what they report helps to shape public perceptions about places and people. If reporters only cover crime and violence, then that is what the public thinks about when a reference is made to the U.S.-Mexico border. Media scholars have found that network television news coverage of the U.S.-Mexico border increasingly paints the region as a more dangerous place. While this is true in parts of the south side of the border, many cities on the north side, including El Paso and San Diego, represent some of the safest places in the country.
While narco tunnels and border security are interesting and important stories to cover, they hardly define the complexity of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Erin Siegal McIntyre’s reporting on educational challenges of young children whose parents have been deported to Tijuana serves as an illustrative example of how to report the border in a distinct and powerful way. This is an issue that runs border-wide, and across borders, and lends itself to a comparative reporting project. Another issue that’s bound to make headlines and loads of money for U.S. investors for years to come: Mexico’s energy reforms, which will allow foreign investment in energy. A recent Congressional Research Service report indicates that potential binational collaborations involving natural gas and oil production has implications for communities all along the U.S.- Mexico border (bit.ly/18CbamH).
Look for open data to drive your stories. Editors don’t have to be convinced to buy expensive databases when much data is now available online. Last summer in Sonora, Mexico, when a leaching pond owned by Grupo Mexico spilled millions of gallons of contaminated water into an important river in the region, Sonorans and Arizonans were reminded that mining interests remain important. For data on mines, journalists can consult an investigative piece recently published by Mexico City newspaper El Universal, in conjunction with Cartográfica, in which the daily reported that mining concessions sit on one-fifth of the country’s land (eluni.mx/1qRe5hH). For stories about migration, reporters can consult the Institute for Justice and Journalism’s Open Data Library (bit.ly/1wYQIby). IRE also has a hefty database library that members can access.
Human rights organizations and academic think tanks frequently have a very good pulse on circumstances on both sides of the border. They can be a great starting point for story ideas, as well provide good data that can add weight to reporting. One of the best national sources in the U.S. for open data on the border and Latin America is the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). On the national level in Mexico, the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH) monitors human rights violations on the border and throughout the country. The civil society organization posts daily reports on a listserv titled “Hoy en DH” (Today in Human Rights). Locally and regionally, all along the border there are dozens of organizations that can provide rich data and information.
Let’s face it: Some stories along the border are simply too big and too expensive for one individual to tackle. That’s when crossborder relationships and projects can pay off.
Given Project Word’s recent report about freelancers around the world having to give up on stories because of scarce resources (http://projectword.org/survey), it seems clear that collaborations are the wave and necessity of the present and future. Some of the best reporting can result from cross-border reporting teams. In 2013, U.S.-based reporter David Barstow and Mexico City-based reporter Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab won a Pulitzer and an IRE award for their coverage of Walmart’s use of bribery to get its way in Mexico. Recently, several organizations have emerged offering a host of benefits from up-to-date information about the U.S.-Mexico border to training and opportunities for collaboration in cross-national/cross-border reporting projects and investigations. Many of them are listed here alphabetically.
List of cross-border organizations
Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona and affiliated faculty member of the university’s Center for Latin American Studies. She is the author of “Muy buenas noches,” Mexico, Television and the Cold War; co-editor of Arizona Firestorm: Global Immigration Realities, National Media, and Provincial Politics; and current co-head of the Border Journalism Network/La red de periodistas de la frontera. She was also past head of the International Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Prior to entering academia, she reported and produced commercial and public television for 16 years, covering politics and the U.S.-Mexico border.
It's officially summer and people are spending a lot of time in the water. If you’re looking for a good story, one place to look is the boating accidents dataset in the NICAR data library. It's been recently updated to include 2014 and is free for IRE members.
Kept by the U.S. Coast Guard, the Recreational Boating Accidents database has detailed information on accidents including if they resulted in death or injury, a description of the event, and the current conditions.
Find out where the most accidents happened, as well as common causes. If an accident happened in your area, compare the circumstances or location with all accidents in your state. Compare total accidents in your state to years prior to see if there was an increase or decrease in the overall number.
You could also use this information to create visualizations. Make a map and mark all of the areas where there’s been an accident or create a chart to show the fluctuation in numbers of injuries and deaths between the busiest summer months, which are generally May to August.
One caveat to note: Several states have prevented the Coast Guard from releasing their records. For 2014, the missing states are AK, CA, CT, HI, MI, MS, OR, PA and WA.
To see a sample of the data, read the documentation or download the database, visit the IRE website (you must be logged in to download the data): https://www.ire.org/nicar/database-library/databases/boating-accidents/.
When Tampa Bay Times reporters Alexandra Zayas and Kameel Stanley got their hands on state and local data about bike tickets, they found some sobering statistics. Tampa police were stopping bicyclists at an alarming rate. And eight out of 10 of the bicyclists ticketed were black.
It’s a great story, and even if your coverage area isn’t handing out bike tickets like candy, this is one that could be replicated in communities across the country. So grab a notebook. On this episode, Alex and Kameel walk us through how they made it happen.
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.
Tampa Bay Times series:
IRE Conference audio:
Music in this episode comes from Podington Bear. Shawn Shinneman wrote and produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
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