Stabile Seminar

The empirical spine of investigative reporting

Syllabus    Weekly schedule   Handouts / Resources

Week ending with Feb. 4 class

Before class

Read "Children and Guns: The Hidden Toll" and "Seeking Gun or Selling One, Web Is a Land of Few Rules". Both stories were part of a Bearing Arms, series of stories from The New York Times by Michael Luo, Mike McIntyre and Griff Palmer in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.

Watch the best practices tutorials (3 parts). Before you watch the third part, consider downloading or printing this document, which will be the basis of the example.

Watch the numbers in the newsroom lecture (or at least listen)

Due Sunday, 5pm: Read enough of this internal affairs report to know what kinds of information it contains about an investigation into domestic violence incidents involving Halford "Bubba" Harris II of the St. John's County Sheriff's Office.

Create a spreadsheet using the concepts in the best practices tutorial that will allow you to track the events in the report. Think about how you will want to use it and what you would need to fact-check on deadline. You don't have to map out the whole thing, but you should enter enough (say, 20 rows) to be able to test any analysis you want to do, incluidng sorting and fact-checking.

Email us a link to your spreadsheet on Dropbox, and a 3-paragraph summary of what else you would need to know before you could say how newsworthy the report is.

Here is the spreadsheet I created using this document, another internal report, and other public records. Use Excel, not Google docs, to look at it. It was used to map out a case that in "Two Gunshots on a Summer Night", by Walt Bogdanich of The New York Times and Glenn Silber of Frontline. It's toward the end, under the heading "A Light Touch". (If you're interested, the CAR elements are woven through that story, but are used more directly in the companion piece, "Departments are Slow to Police Their Own Abusers").

In class

Resources

Going further with the internal affairs report
Spreadsheet skills review
Numbers in the newsroom
Choosing data stories