Jeff South (and his data journalism class)
Virginia Commonwealth University Capital News Service
Contact: jcsouth@vcu.edu
Students in my data journalism class used this tool the day after the first Muslim was elected to the Virginia Senate. During their election night coverage, the students, Hannah Eason and Sravan Gannavarapu, noticed a lot of racist and xenophobic comments posted to news stories on Facebook about Ghazala Hashmi’s victory in the Senate District 10 race. Hannah and Sravan wanted to analyze the comments to quantify the amount of vitriol online. They found that ExportComments.com can generate a CSV file of Facebook comments (at the time, $5 for three days of unlimited use). Hannah and Sravan downloaded about 3,000 comments posted to five Facebook articles about Hashmi’s election and analyzed the data in Excel. The resulting story was distributed the by AP and published by more than 800 news outlets around the world, including The Washington Post. The students also put all 3,000 comments online and created data visualizations.
Matt Kiefer
Stanford University
Contact: mkiefer@stanford.edu
FOIAmail, an open-source framework for automating public records requests, which helps leverage local-level data collection into large-scale investigations.
David Raynor
The News & Observer
Contact: draynor@newsobserver.com
Two stories with the same idea: compare costs of grocery store items and cold/flu items at area retail stores. After gathering the data, we created interactive apps that let users compare prices.
- Which grocery stores have the Triangle’s best prices? We visited 16 chains to find out.
- How much does your cold cost? We checked the prices at local drug and grocery stores.
Yanqi Xu
Investigative Reporting Workshop
Contact: yanqi@irworkshop.org
I’d like to present the Accountability Project, a one-stop resource for newsrooms to track money in politics and delineate networks of interests. The project synthesizes public records including campaign finance, lobbying, salaries, properties, etc. and make it easy to download and share the data. I will demo our search portal to present quick searches at the conference and show local newsrooms can use the feature both for quick-turn stories and in-depth watchdog reporting. It is a very quick way for newsrooms to find their local politicians’ interests and connections from out-of-state without having to navigate data silos that are foreign to them.
Dave Sheingold
Freelancer, formerly of the Bergen Record in New Jersey
Contact: davesdatahut@yahoo.com
In a small newsroom, what are you always? Strapped for time? That big project? Sorry, gotta wait on that. Data for the weekend enterprise. Ummm, maybe. Maybe not, too much else to do. But there are still some smart and interesting things you can do to keep a data analysis presence in your newspaper or media web site. Some key off news. Some don’t. Some connect to terrible tragedies. Some connect to pets and debts.
The common thread is they are quick hits you can do in a day or two, with some simple graphics. Nothing about this is elegant. But it still can provide creative, interesting and unique takes on issues, with a little bit of reader interactivity thrown in.
Often, you can key off news events for a quick data turnaround in advance of that deeper dive for a weekender or longer-term story.
- School bus crash deaths and serious injuries rare in NJ and USA
- New Jersey lottery sells the most in the state’s poorest neighborhoods
- Where NJ homeowners will take a hit from the tax reform bill
- New Jersey leads nation in young adults living with parents, census says
- More New Jersey residents are falling for online scams
- Bearded dragons, parrots, ball pythons top list of New Jersey’s exotic pets
Eric Dietrich
Montana Free Press
Contact: edietrich@montanafreepress.org
While covering the Montana statehouse in 2019, I sat down and adapted OpenStates code to produce a news app tabulating lawmaker voting records.
The process produced a tip that let me investigate how a right-wing website was tracking votes in an effort to influence GOP lawmakers and also set the stage for a story where I explained how a Republican-controlled legislature passed several high-profile bills opposed by the official GOP leadership.
Ashlyn O’Hara
University of Missouri
Contact: ashlynohara@mail.missouri.edu
Deeptector.io a solution for detecting Deepfakes
Andrea Suozzo
Seven Days newspaper
Contact: andrea@sevendaysvt.com
The federal government posts all U.S. nursing home inspection results online in a searchable database. For state-regulated homes, Vermont’s Division of Licensing and Protection posts only poorly scanned, sometimes partially handwritten pdfs in a hard-to-find spot that require additional information to decode (example here). I scraped those inspections, but when we asked for a full list it turned out that nearly 20 percent of the reports generated between 2014 and late 2019 had never been uploaded. Once we had all those documents, they formed the foundation for an investigative collaboration between Seven Days and Vermont Public Radio and a searchable database of Vermont homes, which I built:
Lucia Walinchus
Eye on Ohio, the Ohio Center for Investigative Journalism
Contact: Lucia@eyeonohio.com
- Slides
- Investigation: Blacks, black neighborhoods most likely to be traffic stop targets in Ohio’s 3 biggest cities
- How Much are you Overpaying in Property Tax?
- Taxpayers Lose Out on at Least $11.25 Million, Homeowners and Banks Lose up to $80 Million in Little-known Foreclosure Process That Skips Sheriff’s Sales
Isao Matsunami
Chunichi/Tokyo Shimbun
Contact: isao_ma@on.rim.or.jp
This is a direct inspiration from WRAL report, showcased at NICAR2019. By intense calculation of drive time to voting station, we showed that costly makeshift early-voting stations did not improve overall turnout, implying they just replace Sunday vote.
Michelle Breidenbach
The Post-Standard/Syracuse.com
Contact: mbreidenbach@syracuse.com
We published a series of stories that showed Syracuse’s system of assessing home values is benefiting the rich and overtaxing the poor. The city responded quickly by changing more home values than ever in its annual adjustment. The latest story maps those increases and decreases so people can compare neighborhoods and take their own arguments to City Hall. Grievance hearings are happening now.
To do this project, we used simple google mapping tools and we used excel to analyze the city’s assessment rolls. We also used Caspio to create a searchable database.
Here are some other stories about the issue:
- NY state gives condo owners millions in property tax breaks; the rest of us pay for it
- 3 vending machines saved a builder $3 million in property taxes; a NY law exploited
- New York state sends STAR tax relief checks to people who owe property taxes
Adam Richter
Reading Eagle
Contact: arichter@readingeagle.com
Using Census and tax roll data, as well as statistics from Princeton’s Eviction Lab, I wrote a series of articles that looked into why Reading Pa., where real estate is inexpensive, has such a high rate of rentals and, in particular, evictions. The series, called “City of Renting,” can be found by clicking on the link below.