Stabile Seminar

The empirical spine of investigative reporting

Syllabus    Weekly schedule   Handouts / Resources

Before class

Reading
Due Sunday, 5pm

Using the skills you learned over the past two weeks, analyze this spreadsheet and write a 2- to 5-paragraph lede for a story. You don't have to do any other reporting to get this far. (Of course, if you were to write a real story, you'd have to talk with people. This is just the newsworthy findings.)

The spreadsheet has three sheets. The "documentation" sheet tells you what is in the other two and their sources. Review all of the materials under "Resources" below to see the kinds of things you'll have to know how to do. We would expect you to match the two sheets by their common identifier, deal with missing data, and create a pivot table with some comparisons. Please submit your lede and your final spreadsheet to the Courseworks assignment.

Due by the start of class Tuesday

A 250 to 500 word proposal for your story memo. Please see the assignment in Courseworks for more detail

In class

Resources

Videos

Note: A lot of the examples above use the Major League Baseball salary data as their example. Here's a copy of it if you want to try it yourself.

Tools
Handouts