The Uncharted Backwaters of the Unfashionable

Stones, birds and the ghettoization of data

First Bird: I’ve started a blog at work, one complete with a nerdy picture and a couple posts about spreadsheets. I don’t recommend looking at it now, because I haven’t yet found a way to act professionally and run a blog. But, if you wait until 2009, you can take a look here.

Segue: Tomorrow, I’m going to point readers to Matt Waite’s recent lampoon of the Data Desk concept. I’m curious to see what they think.

Second bird:  I think he makes some good points. He has a habit of doing that. Rote publication of data shouldn’t be the only way we do what we do. But in some cases, it works. Really well.

Take, for instance, the position of the News-Leader a few weeks back. The City had just been lambasted in a state audit, accused of mismanaging the books in a handful of different ways. Use of city-issued purchase cards, the audit said, appeared to be out of hand. I had the database. So I posted it.

Readers ate it up. They searched through the data, finding interesting purchases. They e-mailed us: “Why did that snake XXXX spend $XXX at XXXX? What could he possibly have needed that for?” Our reporting was better for it. We’re still writing stories, and, when it makes sense, I’m still posting relevant datasets.

They go hand-in-hand with stories. I get miffed if a data-driven story doesn’t point to the related data. Similarly, I get miffed if I have to post data without the context a story offers.

I’m excited about the opportunity to add more value to data in the future. With the P-Card info, for instance, it would have been nice to be able to rank the highest spenders, then allow people to drill into each person’s purchases. It would have been nice to allow for dynamic grouping by supplier, cardholder, or department. It would have been really nice to connect the cardholder names with our employee salary database, and allow readers to go to town.  But we’re not there. Yet.

At the same time, there is worth to posting the data in basically raw format. Though J-School may have taught us otherwise, our readers are not mouth-breathing Cro-Magnons. Sometimes a list of votes from a Council meetings is more important than the narrative of how heated the debate was on, say, the dumpster debate. Similarly, opening up a year’s worth of credit card debits is more useful than simply plucking out the big spenders.

As to the issue of site design: Amen. Putting all the databases together makes as much sense as sticking all the blogs together. You don’t read blogs because they’re blogs. (Exhibit A). You read them because the topic is interesting and/or the blogger is incredibly good looking (Exhibit B).

Ahem.

Finally: Site traffic. Our site has seen traffic increase exponentially. We’re now pulling anywhere from 3-4 percent of all unique hits to the site, and we have the highest time spent of any area. I think it has to do with making sure readers know it’s relevant. When we ran the P-Card story, we pointed them to the data. We ran a story about the most oft-convicted, then pointed readers to our conviction DB. We wrote about gas pump tests, then allowed readers to see how it affected them.

Again, I’m not saying Matt’s wrong. This is fine for now, but things will change. Still, this is  a starting point. Our success has led to more of an investment, both in time and resources. I hope that, at other papers, data successes translate into real investment, too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.