Phoenix is the capital city of Arizona. It’s also in the middle of a desert. Yet somehow the state has evolved some wack records laws that don’t seem to accept this as a truth.
Most people I talked to are shocked to learn that records of water usage are entirely blocked from public access. It makes sense. Water is our number one resource here; we’re barraged with ways to conserve water and take a of what natural moisture there is.
Yet we also have the most acres of golf courses in the nation. We have green lawns down every block. And every other house has a pool. While there are laws that govern the way water is generally used, especially by large consumers, there is no way for a regular Joey Citizen to see for himself if those laws are being followed. The records are entirely hidden away. It’s illegal for a water district to give them out. It’s a crime for a citizen to have them.
Sometimes it’s hard to explain why not having access to information is bad. Other times, the argument is made for you, and all you have to do is point to it. Enter the Panama City Press Herald, and a phenomenal piece by Matt Dixon.
Here’s the kicker:
Over the past five years, 2.4 billion gallons of water — 23 percent of all water purchased by Panama City — has gone unaccounted for, according to an analysis of utility records obtained in a public records request. In 2006 alone, the city lost 631 million gallons, the largest single-year amount since at least 1996, according to utility records.
Arizona, we deserve to see how we stack up.
Raw data get a bad rap. They’re told they mean nothing, unless someone goes in and adds”context.” If I were data, I’d hate context. Always stealing my thunder. One day data are told they’re the future of journalism, and the next day journalists are complaining about how they’re used.
It’s a tough life, being data. But I think the rollercoaster ride they’ve been through is unwarranted. Why? Because posting data is the 21st century equivalent of what we’ve been doing all along. As in, ask your grandfather how he ran his newspaper, and you’ll start to see some parallels.
If you, like me, don’t have a grandfather who new jack about the news, let me offer up this paragraph from “The Elements of Journalism” (emphasis my own):
“The individual reporter may not be able to move much beyond a surface level of accuracy in the first story. But the first story builds to a second, in which the sources of news have responded to mistakes and missing elements in the first, and the second to a third, and so on. Context is added in each successive layer.“
I’m a 20-something who’s known computers my whole life, so I can’t speak from experience on this one. But I’ll bet good money that the progression laid out in the above passage played out in but a percentage of stories — that some simply stopped at the first story. There was no added “context”; there were no complaints from sources.
I don’t think that’s bad. Carl Bernstein talks about something called “the best obtainable version of the truth.” And in many cases, thats what a dataset can offer.
Take public salaries (Please! Really folks, I’ll be here all week). Dozens of newspapers have posted the salaries of their local County, school district, Board of Equalization, PTA, Myrtle’s knitting group, and whatever else they can get their hands on. CAR practitioners have bemoaned the move, saying it’s just not journalism.
Here’s why I take issue. When I worked in the IRE Resource Center, I had the thankless task of processing and reading hundreds of “investigative” stories from all around the globe. Most of them came in around the time of the annual IRE contest, and every year there would be a slew of stories with headlines like, “How much do they make?” It’s the easiest CAR story in the book, right? Find your local municipality’s salary database, ask some questions to fill out a story, and score a talker.
In about 70 percent of the stories I read, that was the methodology. In its entirety. As these were contest entires, I can confidently say that there were no follow ups to those stories; they were meant to stand on their own.
Were those journalism?
Many will put those stories on a journalism continuum. “Yes, it was journalism, just not very good journalism.” That argument assumes that, just because the information was laid out in story form, journalism took place.
You can’t have it both ways. If a crappy salary story is journalism, then a raw salary database is journalism.
Me? I’d argue it’s somewhere in the middle. Journalistic, perhaps; done with the intent of providing context to the community, rather than context to the numbers.
It’s not a catch-all argument. Few are. But I think we need to admit that, sometimes, data on its own can achieve the same outcome as a story, especially when “findings” in analysis are lackluster. Dare I say it, Wire fiends? In some cases, I even think it allows us to achieve more with less.
There’s been a lot of just-below-the-surface discussion lately about news orgs finding stories they can own. Des Moines owns the Iowa Caucus. The Washington Post is the source for national politics. And in the biggest official move towards this kind of thinking, the Deseret News has decided it wants to serve up LDS news for the whole world.
The thinking goes something like: “Hey, what with this new-fangled InterTubes thing, we can draw visitors from all over the web. So how can we ge them to come here?” And widgets, digg/reddit submissions, and RSS feeds ensue.
The shortcoming is that not all newspapers have that one thing that’s going to draw the whole web audience to their doorstep. I mean, as cool as Branson is, I just don’t think that’s going to cut it. So nevermind the whole Interweb — if you gain a national following of LDS devotees but lose the geographic draw of your own city, you’re going to lose money. End of story. Staying relevant at home has to come first. Once you have that down, the rest can follow.
So enough lead-in. Here’s the article that got me thinking. Why? Because I’ve made the same argument in the past, and almost got laughed out of the room. But here goes again:
By my estimate, There are two types of newspaper stories: Whoswhats and whyhows. The former is newspaper of record stuff; hirings, firings, reports, meetings, births, deaths and all the rest. The latter is everything else; your insightful features (how does a person with X disease et through the day?), your incisive investigations, or even the not-so incisive (Why did they lose X amount of my money?).
We’ve spilled many a bucket of ink on the whoswhats over the years. But with TV, local news sites, and all forms of niche publications, it represents the low-hanging fruit — the stuff any wannabe journo with a Blogger Profile or a minute of airtime can do.
Investigations. Asking hard questions. Providing information that no one else can provide. Or wants to. That is what we can offer that no one else can. Several organizations are covering City Hall, but not everyone is willing to look at overtime. Or liability payments. Or the role of campaign contributions in City decisions.
Even with IRE pounding the idea of CAR into newsroom heads for decades, the fact still remains: We geeks are uniquely qualified to do these stories. And now, more than ever, our industry needs just that.
That sound (think bozo the clown when a kid just misses the bucket) was my Knight application getting KOd. Dang.
I have to think the fact that it’s already been done, (and quite successfully) had something to do with it.
However, from the “ya win some, ya lose some” Department: The News-Leader is embracing Django. This is good for many reasons, but mostly because I can now stop worrying about the frantic e-mails my kindly web host sends me every few weeks telling me I’m just about out of space.
It also comes as some relief. Shoveling data to the web makes sense in some situations. But it’s there’s not a one-size fits all solution (Sorry Caspio).
November 4th, 2007
11:11 am
News
As I mentioned, things have been happening at just about breakneck speed the past few months. Here are a few things that I think merit mention:
- Springfield 911 0.8 is live on news-leader.com. It allows users some pretty cool access to our police calls database, but leaves a little to be desired. The next round of updates should include, at the very least, an address-radius event finder and associated RSS feed.
- I, too, got in on the love-in that is the Knight Challenge. I’ve never been one for having truly revolutionary ideas (see: this and this), but I did see a place where technology could greatly improve my news organization. In our multimedia office, we have file cabinet after file cabinet filled to the brim with old negatives. Tens of thousands of the things. They span from the 40s through the 90s, and chronicle the whole Ozarks region — every city, most streets, every event that came through. So how cool would it be to put that all online, archived and geotagged, allowing folks to zoom in to their very own street, their block, or even their house, and see how it’s changed over the years. When I was a kid, there was this mediocre bar and grill right in the heart of our century-old neighborhood. Everyone knew the food was, er, uninspired. But the place was always packed, in no small part because of the photos that dotted the walls — photos of our neighborhood as it grew up. Basically, I want to take that idea and open it up to everyone in our community; No need to buy droopy french fries, sir. Enjoy your stay.
- Finally, as of this week the wall between my role as Data Editor and my craving to report has come crashing down. I’m again going to be doing some regular old reporting, probably starting with Springfield’s interesting policy to charge for both staff time AND benefits. What’s going to be odd about this position is that there’s no associated beat — any stories are either going to have to come through reporters, or from data work. Yeah, anyone who has been down this road before should get in touch. Links will probably be appearing as the stories run.