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By Anadil Iftekhar
Data is boring. Numbers are confusing. Limit them, hide them, focus more on people. Haven’t you been hearing this a lot lately?
“We are here to say you shouldn’t do that,” said Will Craft. Craft and his colleague, Madeleine Baran, work at American Public Media. In a 2017 CAR Conference panel, they sat with Michael Corey from Reveal to discuss how data could be made more attractive and easy for audio journalism.
Baran and Craft discussed how they covered crime clearance rates on their investigative podcast, "In The Dark." The nine-episode show looks at how law enforcement mishandled the Jacob Wetterling child abduction. The conversation about clearance rates was light and conversational, even though the material was grave.
In the podcast, Craft was the "adventure seeker," who would come back and discuss his findings with Baran on the show. He would discuss and explain the numbers, creating suspense and developing the story.
Corey played music to tell a numbers story. For data on Oklahoma’s earthquakes, his team, including a sound engineer, used Python and data sonification mixed with piano notes – the audio version of data visualization. The music notes amplified accordingly.
The panel stressed that casual conversations, drama, suspense, music and data can make for rich storytelling you simply can’t convey in print.
By Shane Sanderson
When the Palm Beach Post obtained a spreadsheet made by a clerical worker at the local medical examiner’s office, reporters had to verify it.
The office worker had noticed an escalation in the number of overdose deaths and she began a project recording the details. The resulting spreadsheet had something like 100 columns, full of dirty and perhaps inaccurate data.
Journalists ended up requesting and receiving cover pages from the medical examiner’s original reports, police reports, and reports from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Then Joel Engelhardt’s team called family members of the 216 people that died from heroin overdoses in Palm Beach County.
Engelhardt shared his verification story as part of a panel with Jennifer Forsyth of the Wall Street Journal on bulletproofing data stories.
Forsyth talked about her “nightmare,” in which she imagined she would have to take the stand in a lawsuit against her news organization for a story she had not properly verified. To avoid that scenario, she asks a series of questions of her data reporters:
Forsyth also spelled out best practices for editors:
By Amanda Nero
Sandhya Kambhampati, most recently a Knight-Mozilla fellow working in Berlin, Germany, helped CAR Conference attendees turn mediocre spreadsheets into ready-to-use data for analysis.
Kambhampati took attendees through the dos and dont’s of formatting data in Excel. The session focused on the top errors she and her colleagues have run across in newsrooms all over the world.
She stressed four things to avoid while structuring your data:
Four tricks for organization:
She said data structuring and organization is a lot of trial and error. Instinctual decisions on how to parse, sort and analyze comes with time, but Kambhampati’s simple set of rules is a good place to start.
By Haotian Mai
"It’s a fascinating time to be studying housing,” said Skylar Olsen, a senior economist from Zillow. On Thursday, Olsen sat on a housing data panel with Tim Henderson, a demographics writer and data analyst for Stateline, at the 2017 CAR Conference.
For companies like Zillow, housing data fuels their services. For homeowners, housing data reflects how the market is performing and how it’s affecting their real lives. But for journalists, there are stories to be told.
Although some metro areas have seen optimistic growth in housing prices, the realities vary from place to place. Some still have a long way to go for restoring the market vitality from the housing crash almost a decade ago.
Olsen explained that Jacksonville, the host city for this year’s conference, has ranked as one of the highest “negative equity rates” in the country, where mortgage homeowners are paying rates even higher than the home values.
Several other findings Olsen shared:
Revealing trends in housing data is one thing, but transforming them into news stories is another. Henderson also shared resources and tips for making stories out of housing data:
By Dariya Tsyrenzhapova
How do journalists make sense out of the abundance of data out there? Are medians and averages actually accurate representations of reality? What are the best ways to improve your storytelling with numbers?
Larry Fenn, a data journalist with the Associated Press, Paul Overberg with the Wall Street Journal and Holly Hacker of the Dallas Morning News sat down at the CAR Conference to share some answers.
Overberg said that indexes can be helpful in tackling and analyzing complex issues. But when it comes to data reporting, journalists’ primary job is to “quantify, analyze and distill” information with a critical eye.
What actually makes a good index? “It’s the power to explain and especially to reveal something,” Overberg said, adding that “simple, transparent and portable” indexes can be applied across a larger population.
Check out Overberg’s compiled list of indexes that you can utilize and adapt for your reporting.
Panelists said it’s critical for journalists to understand what exactly they want to know out of an avalanche of data variables? “Be careful about going on a variable shopping spree,” warned Hacker. Although it can be tempting, a journalist’s ultimate goal should be to simplify and not over-explain.
Fenn added that factor analysis comes in handy when you try to generalize your data by looking closely at differences and commonalities within a set of numbers.
“It’s up to us, journalists and humans,” Fenn said, “to label these [variables] and to find the actual meaning.” This decision-making process all boils down to figuring out what variables are the most important.
But panelists stressed the importance of finding a relationship in the data that’s linear and not cyclical in nature. This becomes essential when you’re cutting through the disruptive noise in column after column.
By Daniel Levitt
Sports data often gets overlooked as a source of investigative stories. But Steve Doig of Arizona State University and Paula Lavigne of ESPN showed journalists that we can – and should – hold sports organizations accountable.
Both Doig and Lavigne entered the sports journalism world from other beats. Doig covered science, education and politics for more than 19 years at the Miami Herald. Lavigne was a reporter on multiple beats at the Dallas Morning News and Des Moines Register before coming to ESPN.
Throughout their careers, data was a staple to their investigative stories.
Doig now teaches all he has learned to students on the newly-created sports journalism track at ASU. Lavigne is a full-time sports watchdog, keeping some of the largest sports teams in the country in line. Both shared their data sources with conference attendees.
Doig separated his main sources into three categories: official, unofficial and academics. The leagues – the NBA, NFL, MLB, etc. – are the official sources. Unofficial sources include ESPN, FiveThirtyEight and Sports Reference. Doig also shared a list of academics, or “obsessed fans” that keep fountains of data:
Lavigne also showcased her sources:
Not included in the session, but some other credible sites worth checking out are Draft Express, Baseball Savant, Synergy Sports Tech and Spotrac.
By Natalie Lung
Algorithms play an increasingly prominent role in journalism, but we’ve been slow to scrutinize those algorithms like we would any other source.
ProPublica senior reporter Julia Angwin, Stanford computer science Ph.D. candidate Sam Corbett-Davies, and Philip Merrill College of Journalism assistant professor Nick Diakopoulos shared their experience in evaluating algorithmic fairness at the 2017 CAR Conference.
Angwin stressed the importance of independent testing when using algorithms. Her example was a recidivism prediction model. She said that algorithms first published by a company or a professor in a whitepaper come under almost no scrutiny by the jurisdictions buying them. Authorities only put out their own analysis of the recidivism algorithm after they have been using it for years.
She also emphasized the need to examine the outcomes, and not the formulas, when evaluating algorithms. Even if the companies or institutions share their algorithms with you, as they did in the recidivism investigation, that might not be enough. Transparency "may be necessary, but not a sufficient condition" for examining an algorithm, Angwin said.
Corbett-Davies, whose research applies machine learning and statistics to questions of politics and policy, said he found a problem in the recidivism algorithm. He pointed to the lack of transparency behind the training data and the fact that the algorithm has several potentially dubious features. He also told them not to give up on algorithms because they are more consistent than humans (judges).
Diakopoulos introduced “Algorithm Tips”, a database of 5,000 leads on algorithms discovered on .gov domains, which he developed with his team at the University of Maryland. They vetted all the links by using different dimensions of newsworthiness, in hopes of helping more journalists get started with algorithmic accountability.
At our annual CAR conference in Jacksonville, IRE and NICAR announced initial steps to help save federal data that could disappear.
Our hope is to help organize the efforts currently underway by journalists and concerned citizens. IRE and NICAR will host a central directory on our website to show submitted details on rescued data and where it’s kept. Our hope is to prevent duplicate efforts and provide transparency.
We’re asking those interested to complete a survey to tell us if they have collected a dataset or if there is a specific dataset that there is concern about. If you know about a dataset that has already been saved by another organization, we’d love to know that too. In the survey, you can tell us more about the dataset and how you use it in your reporting already.
We will collect this data in the original format that it comes from on a government website. We don’t guarantee any cleanliness or documentation of the data. Our goal is to collect it just as it exists. We will document the source of the data, who downloaded it and when. Whether you’ve scraped the data or received it via FOIA, we want to hear from you.
Other organizations, like DataRefuge, have been holding data rescue events across the country, harvesting and saving environmental and climate data. Explore the 140 datasets they have already saved. We plan to post their index on ire.org.
If you have any questions, feel free to email director of data services Charles Minshew at Charles@ire.org or call (573) 882-1982.
The 2017 CAR Conference app is now available through Guidebook!
We encourage you to download our mobile guide to enhance your experience at the 2017 CAR Conference. You'll be able to plan your day with a personalized schedule, browse maps and connect with other attendees.
The app is free and compatible with iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches and Android devices. Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry users can access the same information via our mobile site.
To get the guide, choose one of the methods below:
Thank you to our hosts, The Florida Times-Union/Jacksonville.com and Morris Publishing Group, and our sponsors and supporters: Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Google, Knight Foundation, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, Lumina Foundation, and Missouri School of Journalism.
Make sure to visit our exhibitors: Esri, Vigilant Web Inc., and Zillow. Their booths are located on the 3rd floor sky bridge.
Looking for coffee or a quick breakfast? We are setting up a to-go coffee station on the 3rd floor sky bridge from 7:30-9:15 a.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Grab a cup of coffee for $2 or refill your cup for $1. (These prices will not be applicable in the Currents Lounge and Coffee Bar.) Granola bars, pastries, bagels and whole fruit also will be available.
Don’t forget to fill out session evaluations. Click on the link for each session in the Guidebook app. You will also get a daily email with a link to review everything that happened that day. You can use either method. Your feedback is important to us and helps us plan future conferences.
THURSDAY:
Help us kick off the 2017 CAR Conference! Stop by the welcome reception in River Terrace 1 today at 6 p.m. Each attendee will receive one drink ticket for beer, wine, soda or bottled water.
FRIDAY:
We’ve added two new Friday sessions hosted by the Knight Foundation: “Show them your everything: Optimizing data journalism for trust” at 10:15 a.m. and “Knight Foundation office hours” at 11:30 a.m. Both sessions will take place in Hart, 4th Floor (4106).
Don’t miss our special events Friday afternoon. The Lightning Talks will take place in Conference Center A/B at 4:45 p.m. Stick around for a few minutes after the talks while we present the Philip Meyer Journalism Awards. Then, at 6:15 p.m., join us in River Terrace 1 for a reception honoring the winners. We’ll also be celebrating the life of former IRE training director David Donald who passed away in December.
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