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
- Louise Story, a Columbia alum and investigative reporter at The New York Times, will stop by for a visit. She took a version of this class when she was at Columbia, and she can tell you what parts were most useful in her quick ascent.
- Discussion of the reading
- Discussion of the homework
- Initial work on your story memo
Resources
Going further with the internal affairs report
- Try putting your spreadsheet into a timeline using one of the more common tools. You could try Simile Exhibit from the MIT CSAIL group; an experimental tool created at Duke University called TimeFlow; the Javascript library TimelineSetter from Propublica; or TimelineJS from the Knight Lab.
- Upload the report DocumentCloud and use its highlighting and commenting capability to annotate the document. Look at its analytics to find names, dates, and places.
Spreadsheet skills review
- Tip sheet from best practices lecture as a reminder
- Quick review of formulas in Excel, from IRE. We'll use this again later when we go over string functions and dates. (You'll have to log in to your IRE account for access to this and many other resources.)
- Formatting your sheet for efficiency and data integrity. This is almost 15 years old, so it doesn't look the same now. But the ideas are similar, and the tutorial has a more up-to-date look. One disadvantage of Google spreadsheets is that you don't have the same kind of control and shortcuts.
Numbers in the newsroom
- Tip sheet and slides from the numbers lecture.
- A Reynolds Center blog post about the same lecture Sarah gave at a SABEW conference in 2012
- Chad Skelton's list of tips, culled from IRE resources and the NICAR-L listserv
- "Avoiding Numeric Novocaine: Writing Well with Numbers", Chip Scanlan, Poynter Institute, updated in 2011.
Choosing data stories
- Another handout from Mike Berens, this time on choosing stories.
- USA Today's Alison Young's slide show and tipsheet on generating investigative ideas
- IRE's resource center query for "car" + "ideas".
- Mary Jo Webster's tip sheet on A Data State of Mind