News Reporting and Public Records

In honor of our class midterm and impending spring break, I’m highlighting a couple of investigations close to home–Gainesville, for us.

The first example comes from the Gainesville Sun’s Watchdog blog, which highlights issues related to public affairs. The discussion is about fake fish and how some restaurants have been serving catfish and calling it grouper. The comment stems from a St. Petersburg Times story from 2006 which examined the issue. The Sun quoted a USA Today story that suggested the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which conducts restaurant inspections, documented 139 cases of fake grouper in a 21-month period.

Here’s a hard news approach to an arguably soft news story. Public records are useful in so many ways.

My other example comes from the March 2 Sun, which examines outside consulting fees from Alachua County Property Appraiser Ed Crapo. Sun Reporter Nathan Crabbe’s main source is Crapo’s public disclosure forms–which all public officials in Florida must prepare annually. Great stories are just mouse clicks away….

Both of today’s data-driven examples stem indirectly from my UF Journalism colleague Mindy McAdams and directly from the recent Poynter Institute for Media Studies seminar on Multimedia Journalism for College Educators. McAdams was a visiting faculty member for the annual seminar, which I attended a few years back.

Anyway, I mention these because both use data in different ways. First, take a look at this Iraq Casualties mapping site. This interactive site maps the locations and daily deaths for each coalition casualty since the U.S. invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. It takes a while to load, but it’s worth it, for effect. Upon reading the methodology, it becomes clear that the data for this setup came from a simple spreadsheet.

The second link is to a New York Times piece on buying and renting homes. This site calculates the costs of buying and renting (including other factors such as insurance, mortgage fees etc.) to determine what is best for each prospective homeowner. Again, it starts with a spreadsheet and calcuates numbers based on formulas–just like Excel, Access and all of those others.

Yes, folks, it’s really that important.

I’ve got two quick items related to information gathering to share today:

1) The Gainesville Sun–our local paper–has started a Watchdog Blog, where two staff reporters discuss and update their investigations into public affairs issues.

2) This comes from Alligator online Managing Editor Megan Taylor. The Portland Press Herald did a three-day series on suspended drivers on the roads in Maine. The series was a multi-media look at how these drivers have increased accidents and how they stay on the roads, along with some informative graphics. My favorite piece, of course, is their “how we did it” section, which details how the information was obtained and analyzed.

In many ways, this tip is a no-brainer; however, I have to admit that it didn’t occur to me until today. In a conversation with my UF colleagues, Ron Rodgers, was talking about how some reporters employ Google alerts to learn more about particular topics and people in their coverage area.

Google alerts are constantly running queries on particular searches that you can set up to receive via email. That is, reporters can set up alerts to let them know when news, blogs or other information about a specific topic or person hits the web. It’s an effective way to keep on top of things on a reporter’s metaphoric radar screen.

On another note, since it’s the day after Super Tuesday elections, it’s time to take a look at one of (and there are others) the most comprehensive and effective election results pages. The New York Times is reporting results via graphics by party, state, and county in a user-friendly array of graphics. It’s worth a look, just to see how they’ve split these results up.

A friend sent to me this series done by the Seattle Times on criminal activity involving the University of Washington Husky football team, which won the Rose Bowl in 2000.

It’s a four-part series entitled “Victory and Ruins” demonstrating how these players may have been treated a bit more leniently because of their status as sports figures. Just FYI, the online version doesn’t link that well through the series, so you may have to hunt a bit to find it–the first three parts have been posted as of today. I’ve given you the introduction above, but here are links to the others: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

There are also web extras as well, along with PDFs of many of the documents that the reporters obtained.

What I like about this series is its focus and reliance on public records. In the link to sources for this story for Part 3, the reporters detail their sources, including 91 public records requests completed to get this information for the series. These sources include transcripts and academic information that often would not be public records for individuals. However, because these players were college athletes and accused of criminal activity, much of their information became public.

Today’s story relied on the following documents: investigative records from the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the Seattle Police Department and the University of Washington Police Department; probation reports and documents from the Washington State Department of Corrections; Williams’ academic transcript and other records from the UW, including correspondence detailing the team’s effort to lift Williams’ scholarship; court records and transcripts from King County Superior Court and King County District Court; and accounts from The Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The News Tribune of Tacoma and Dawgman.com.

For this series, reporters relied heavily on public records, filing 91 public-disclosure requests with 27 agencies in Washington and California. Reporters also conducted dozens of interviews of players, players’ relatives, coaches, university administrators, professors, academic advisers, prosecutors, police officers, lawyers, judges and others who had dealings with the UW’s 2000 football team.

It’s a solid series that certainly will raise the hackles of the football-supporting public in Seattle. But, the paper points fingers at itself in a few places, nothing that it, too, overlooked some of these issues in 2000 when they were happening. The writers point out that, despite the presence of public records, journalists did not go searching for details about these players infractions that were readily availble with some investigative reporting.

To add to this saga, here’s a story from Jan. 10 that focuses on emails (obtained through public records) that outline pledges of money and donations if UW fired its current head coach.

Our student paper here, the Alligator, did a great job this week taking a look at presidential campaign contributions thus far for University of Florida students and staff. I’d consider this a mini-version of computer assisted reporting–something we just talked about last week in class. Writer Drew Harwell (a fact finding alum, of course) analyzed which of the top candidates are getting the most money from designated UF students and staff.

It’s a nice piece that compares those with the highest UF contributions with how nationwide contributions. Good work. One question: Ron Paul?

The paper also uses a pie chart to demonstrate the contributions. I have to admit that the print version of this graphic is much clearer and more understandable than the online version, at least at first. However, once you’re willing to delve a bit further into their college contributions section, you see a lot more, including individual contributions. For example, UF Provost Janie Fouke gave $2,300 to Democrat hopeful John Edwards.

In terms of presentation, I love the charts, but I wish they were more prevalent in the story. It’s a good lessen in the importance of being user-friendly with data. Sometimes the best work can get overshadowed by poor presentation. If a reader can’t decipher a graphic, months of work can be lost in translation. In this case, I’d say there are outstanding charts in the story, but you’ve got to dig a little to find them.

Good thing that’s what I teach in fact finding.

The first assignment I give in Fact Finding each semester is a type of treasure hunt where I randomly assign students 10 questions–five of which have to be answered by a source in the journalism library and five of which have to be answered by an online source. The goal is to make students aware of what kinds of sources are available to them–and to start working on their critical thinking skills. As in: what kind of source would have the information that I need to answer this question?

For example, they may not know that a good source for federal immigration records can be found here or that background about Florida Gift Giver’s Guide might best be found in the Florida Public Records Handbook. That’s why the assignment is important. I have two big hints for students working on the assignment: 1) Peruse the class Resource Page. It’s a good starting point. And 2) Use the handbook to read up on some of the records that you’re being asked about–even those online. Getting a sense of what’s involved in some of those records will save you some searching time.

I know some former students read my irregularly updated blog, so if you have any tips for the students, I bet they’ll appreciate it.

Good luck.

I’ve been approached by a student to help her with an independent study project this semester to learn more about computer-assisted reporting, so we’ve just worked out the details. This isn’t something that I do on a regular basis, but she has asked for more directed study in terms of learning number-crunching and applying it to multi-media work. It’s a growing field, and I think she’ll do well. Basically, I’m open to the idea if a student has a clear idea of what he/she wants to do and it can be done in a semester (and I don’t have 20 others who want the same opportunity at the same time).

Fact Finding provides an introduction to CAR, with some basic skills, but for those who want to pursue this as a career choice, they need to know more than the basics. So, we’re seeing how well this works out. Already, we’ve gotten lots of feedback from those in the field about some ideas . But here’s what we’ve decided on: she’ll develop a topic and specific research angles, and then choose an existing dataset that she thinks will help answer her questions. Then, we’ll start with the basics of data cleaning on Excel and I’ll give her some skill sets. That is, I’ll probably illustrate the technique on one dataset and have her mimick it on her own dataset.

Ultimately, she’ll develop a story package based in part on what she learns from this process. I hope it will be a portfolio piece for her. Right now, we’re still ironing out the topic, however. I consider it similar to editor/reporter negotiations.

One thing we decided not to do was have her create her own dataset or do a public records request for it. I had two reasons for this decision: 1) Understanding how massive and ugly raw data can be is a key element to understanding this process. Having a 50,000 case dataset with roughly 400 variables is tough for anyone to navigate; and 2) I was afraid that the request she made may get bogged down and we’d never get the data we needed to do the study.

However, I may have been overestimating the timing of the second issue. I gave her an unrelated assignment to request information from the Alachua County Health Department to use as an example for Fact Finding–to give her some public records requesting experience, and we received the data in roughly 3 business days. I guess you never know.

As I prep for another semester of Applied Fact Finding at the University of Florida, I’ve been sorting through some of my newer links and ideas for students. I stumbled across one that I found a few months ago. This link comes from the Sunlight Foundation, which is an organization that examines government access and transparency. It is part of their insanely useful government resource pages. These are generally links to other databases and sites with large amounts of government-related data. The links include sections on contractors, politics, policies, legislators and travel (among others).

It’s also got link to Governmentdocs.org, which permits searches of government-related documents that have been obtained from FOIA requests.

It’s nice compilation of site for those starting out on investigations and looking for some data to help guide their research. Undoubtedly, we’ll spend some time on this site once the semester begins.

So, I welcome my newest additions to Applied Fact Finding and hope you enjoy what you see here.

Because I have some time between semesters, I thought I’d share the blog love for our new graduate multimedia class and the students’ final projects.

My colleague Mindy McAdams, the Knight Chair for journalism technologies and the democratic process, has developed a graduate multimedia class called Journalism Toolkit 1. She talks about it in her latest blog post (among others), which can be read here.

While the course focuses on digital storytelling, my interest in it for the purposes of this post is to examine the ways the students employed data and/or mapping to enhance their projects. Here are a few examples:
Deadly Roads, Transgender Legislation, Affordable Housing,

And for the local public records enthusiast, here is mater’s student Cher Philips, who runs her own McIntosh, Florida, community blog, using mapping software to examine water usage in Florida.

Mindy is teaching a Toolkit 2 in the spring, so I can’t wait to see what the students come up with in that course. Since I teach an undergraduate information-gathering course, I enjoy showcasing these examples to demonstrate how students can employee skills from my class in practical situations.