Journalist's Journal
By Daniel Lathrop Posted Oct 1 2007
I’m a reporter who plays with databases. More importantly, perhaps, I’ve become a journalist who encourages citizens to play with data. Many smart people have said that this is an important new frontier in journalism.
Me, I’m an investigative reporter. I search databases to dig up hard-to-find facts and analyze databases to discover hard-to-find patterns. Because of that, and because journalists are all part packrat, I have stacks of CDs and floppy disks on my desk containing data that I or my colleagues have gathered over the years.
Right now, in my newsroom (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and many others around the world, there is major ferment about the role of news databases on the Web. Gannett is mandating a “data desk” at every newspaper, and washingtonpost.com has some of the smartest journalists in the country working on interactive news databases, such as “Faces of the Fallen.”
This is also an area of endeavor in which independent, small and one-person news operations can take on Big Media and win. But more on that later. First, let’s talk about my newsroom.
My colleagues and I use an editorial front-end software system called CCI NewsDesk (also used by The Washington Post and The New York Times) to write stories, edit and revise them, store notes, plan our story budgets and lay out pages. At the heart of CCI lives — what else? — a database.
When we’re done writing and editing, we export from CCI’s database and import the story into the Microsoft SQL Server database, which provides the drive train of our Web site.
The stories and pictures we put into those databases are the result of hard work hunting down and gathering up facts and hours spent crafting prose or making photographs, as well as the intelligence and judgment of a lot of editors and copy editors. Data are picked, peeled and prepared into a gourmet meal of information.
As this magazine was going to press, I was working with others on an ambitious effort to make the Post-Intelligencer Web site a repository of data — giving the public access to the ingredients from our pantry. I hope you’ll take the time to check it out at seattlepi.com/data because I can’t get into too many specifics before those efforts go public.
So instead I’ll tell you the story of the Center for Public Integrity, the nonprofit news organization where I was database editor before joining the staff of the Post-Intelligencer last year.
One of my first projects at CPI was to update the system we used to track the finances of the 2004 presidential and vice presidential candidates. In the database, we took the candidates’ financial details, which were stored on paper at various government agencies, and put them on the Web.
The project was a perfect example of how to make use of material online, material that would otherwise simply litter a reporter’s desk once the story was done. I won’t pretend that it generated a terrific amount of traffic, but it did make the center the go-to source for information on the finances of the presidential candidates. That’s no small thing, given that the wealth of Teresa Heinz-Kerry, wife of candidate Sen. John Kerry, was a major topic of discussion since before the Iowa caucus until after Election Day.
In fact, the CPI has developed a niche in taking hard-to-find or hard-to-use information and making it available to other reporters and to citizens in the course of mounting its award-winning investigative reporting projects. While at the CPI, I worked on making lobbying records easily searchable, creating media ownership profiles for every media market in the U.S. that noted the political influences of those media owners, and creating the first-ever database that tracked the corporate junkets taken by every member of Congress and their staffs.
Each of those projects involved writing substantive stories of the kind that would run in a newspaper, but the life those projects have had, and continue to have online, exists because the research that led to those stories becomes a resource for others. Each of those projects involved the work of dozens of members of the CPI’s staff. The “LobbyWatch” project would have been impossible without the close collaboration of political editor Alex Knott (now editor of “Congressional Quarterly’s PoliticalMoneyLine,” an online database reporting the location of money in politics), web developer Han Nguyen (who is now making a much better living at a Web consulting shop) and researcher/writer Elizabeth Brown (now working elsewhere in the nonprofit sector).
The reference we created included materials gathered from government Web sites, lobbyists, media sources and public records, and it provided groundbreaking insight into Washington, D.C.’s political influence industry. The key was to use databases and the Web to make every piece of information we had gathered available to the general public in a user-friendly way.
The Web is more than just an opportunity to use photos, videos, audio and text together in a new way. The Web allows us to create journalism with a shelf life that is “always on” when readers search for it. It gives daily journalists the power to immortalize their work, a power once reserved for authors and documentarians.
So along with collecting video, audio and text to create great news stories, we can have an impact by publishing interviews, databases, documents and other materials we gather in the course of reporting. Doing so can make our work relevant for the long haul.