#28

Sat, 06/08 03:40PM 27:14

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

data, newsrooms, people, story, journalism, jennifer, journalist, students, database, brent, computer,
reporter, editor, skills, investigative reporting, interactive maps, investigative reporters, records,
investigation, analysis

SPEAKERS

Brent Walth, Jennifer LaFleur, Damian Radcliffe

D Damian Radcliffe 00:11

Hello and welcome to the Demystifying Media Podcast from the University of Oregon. I'm
Damian Radcliffe, the Carolyn S. Chambers, Professor of journalism and in this series I
talked to leading media researchers and practitioners both about their work and the
trends they see shaping the future of their industry. My guest today is Jennifer LaFleur,
data editor for the Investigative Reporting Workshop. And Jennifer also teaches data
journalism at American University. As a senior editor at Reveal from the Center for
Investigative Reporting, Jennifer managed data journalists, investigative reporters and
fellows across dozens of major projects, one of which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer
Prize. Prior to this, she was the director of computer assisted reporting and pro publica
and training director for investigative reporters and editors, also known as IRE. Jennifer,
thank you for joining us.

J Jennifer LaFleur 00:55

Thanks for having me.

D Damian Radcliffe 00:56

Alongside Jennifer, today we have another special guest, my friend and colleague Brent
Walth an assistant professor here at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and

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 Communication. A Pulitzer finalist in 2000 and a winner in 2001. Brent's experience
includes working as a staff writer and managing editor for Willamette Week, Oregon
State Capitol correspondent for The Eugene Register-Guard, and as Washington DC
correspondent and a senior investigative reporter for the Oregonian. Brent, thank you for
also joining us.

B Brent Walth 01:21

Thanks for having me.

D Damian Radcliffe 01:21

So, Jennifer, your visit to Oregon this week is supported by The Catalyst Project, which
Brent is one of the leaders on, we'll talk a bit more about that project and how your visit
ties into that in a moment. But I really wanted to start by just kind of exploring, how did
you get into the data space, what kind of drove your passionate interest in this as a form
of journalism?

J Jennifer LaFleur 01:43

So I always wanted to be a journalist. But my family is mostly engineers who were
appalled at the notion of journalism as a career. So I kind of snuck it in a little bit. To my
undergrad, I studied computer science, snuck in a little bit of journalism, and then later got
my masters in journalism from the University of Missouri. And for many years was told by
professors to choose one or the other, I never amount to anything. When someone tells
me No, I, of course, go the opposite direction as any good journalist does. And I found a
lot of ways, this was a great way to marry my skills and interests together and back in the
day, not very many people were doing this and it meant I could do stories that no one else
could do.

D Damian Radcliffe 02:30

So what are some of those stories? And why does data journalism matter? What does it
bring to the table that perhaps other parts of the newsroom do not?

J Jennifer LaFleur 02:39

Well, with, with data, you can look at an entire population rather than you know, a few
examples that allows you to pick and choose some of the best stories. It's primary
research, you know, so no longer Are we recording on someone else's primary research,

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 but we're doing our own primary research. And in that, we can find trends and things that
we couldn't find any other way. And I don't always believe government reports. So I'd
much rather have the granular data behind that report. So I can look at it myself and find
trends that way. One of the more powerful things we do is matching data sets together
that were not necessarily intended to go together to find trends across this data. When I
worked in Texas, we were investigating the US prison system there. And we were able to
look at people in the prison and whether or not they had workers in the prison and
whether or not they had criminal convictions. And many, many of the workers who had
the most abuse allegations raised against them also had a violent crimes in their past.

D Damian Radcliffe 03:45

So it's really interesting that then do you describe that tension when you were at school
between kind of us go to the computer science or journalism because we've seen a shift
now where arguably a journalist with some computer science sensibilities and
understanding of like you said yesterday, you know, if you can do a pivot table in a
newsroom, then you seen as having magic powers.And we are, I think starting to see a
shift Brent, would you agree in terms of how these skills are valued in newsrooms?

B Brent Walth 04:12

Yeah, I think they are seen now as essential, as opposed to being seen as a couple of
people go off in the corner and do for days or weeks at a time and come back with, you
know, numbers or a chart. It did become had become integrated into storytelling. And I
think that's a huge gain from when I first started doing to journalism, which was 1992. And
then the only people who were allowed to do it were folks who were given permission to
use a computer for the Intel 386 as fast as it could go. And if you were given permission to
use that computer, then you can begin to, you know, understand it, but now it's it's
essential, it's an essential skill.

D Damian Radcliffe 05:01

So what do you see as the barriers to kind of greater adoption of this skill and kind of
more of these stories, both from the perspective of kind of students that perhaps we're
teaching here, and then also, professionals in the workplace?

J Jennifer LaFleur 05:14

I do think there are some newsrooms where unless management understands the value of
data and reporting, and they're not calling for it, it's seen as like this extra thing in the

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 corner. Where the real reporters want the data journalist to like add a number to their
story. But not seeing it as foundational to the very, you know, the very base of the
investigation. So a lot of it just comes from newsroom culture, I think I think they're still on
newsrooms, where they don't value data journalism, and they need more skills. The job
listings, though, at the investigative reporting conferences, all of them, whether it's an
investigative reporter, a beat reporter, data reporter, they're all calling for data skills. Part
of the issue is that data is kind of through it, you know, what used across lots of different
skills. So there are specializations within data journalism, it's very hard to find somebody
who can do everything, you know, can analyze and do an investigation can build a
beautiful, interactive app. So I think, in building a team, what I tried to do at reveal is build
a team that had complementary skills and worked well together. So I had together all the
things I needed.

D Damian Radcliffe 06:33

And Brent, how do you see this playing out in the classroom?

B Brent Walth 06:36

Well, in classroom, many students come in with some experience, particularly with Excel.
And that's a huge step up just to be able to understand how to sort and calculate and,
and filter data. I was thinking about my own experience here as an undergrad, I took a
computer science class programming, you know, all things basic, and Fortran, and the
idea that you could take a list of 100 things and sort them in a flash. Which then was
several seconds, you know, always stuck with me. And the fact that, is so many students
coming with that. But I think we're where the intimidation comes in. The difficult part of it,
is where do you find the data? I mean, most people who do data journalism will say that
the last thing you really want to do is build your own database from scratch, although
many of us have done that. You want to be able to find it. And oftentimes, it's in the hands
of government agencies, and people there are often very reluctant to share it. Or they
make it very expensive. Or they make it very difficult. And as Jennifer's pointed out, during
her visit, and anyone who's dealt with government data, know that is oftentimes messy.
It's not tidy, it's not exactly the way, it takes a lot of work. So when we say did journalism,
we're talking about all kinds from scraping information from the web, to making sense of
messy databases, to the analysis that goes in. And Jennifer also made a really strong
point when speaking to students here during her visit, which is in some ways, you, you
learn what you need to know for the story, the story really comes first. And then you step
back and say, How can do to help us tell that story. And in that way, you begin to build the
experience to get to that story, and then you go in and build on for the next one.

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D Damian Radcliffe 08:35
And the fact that often this is a long and complicated and kind of messy process, coupled
with the fact that journalists are under more pressure to kind of turn around stories
quicker than ever, a lot of journalists still kind of, I think, hold to this kind of mantra that
I'm a journalist, so I don't have to do math. How do you overcome those potential barriers?

J Jennifer LaFleur 08:55

And those people probably aren't going to do database stories. But some of the most of
what I work with is investigative teams. Where if you want to uncover something for an
investigation, most of the time, those records are in a computer. I sat next to someone,
when I worked at a newspaper, many years ago, we were working on an investigation and
he had 200 boxes of paper documents. And he literally was doing computer analysis with
paper, he would make stacks and count them, and then make other stacks and count
them. And I said, you know, if we get this in a database, we could probably do what you're
doing in about 20 minutes. So we ended up getting the data and making his life a whole
lot easier. So is part of the challenge for newsrooms when you talked about needing to
help editors understand the benefits of this, but is it also about helping them be aware of
the tools that can make their lives easier? Yeah. And part of that is if a data team or
people who have data skills in a newsroom or in communication with everybody else in
the newsroom, you know, where they're stuck, and you know, where you might be able to
help them with a little thing here and there. And also newsrooms need training. Just
baseline training, so that all reporters can do you know, a spreadsheet. That should just be
a ground level thing that every reporter knows how to do. Because we get data all the
time, whether you're covering your city budget, which usually comes in a spreadsheet,
census stories, that's all spreadsheet based stuff, and it should be a baseline scale,

B Brent Walth 10:24

Yes, it can be very easy to newsroom to become intimidated by all the terms and the
technology. And it seems like every six months, there's a new, there's a new, there's a new
app, but there's a new approach, or there's a new language to use. And I think where I had
as a reporter who dealt with data quite a bit, the most success was showing people what,
not necessarily how to write a particular formula, or how to get something to fill into a
database, as much as what the data could reveal. Like, you know, what can they show,
they can show patterns, they can show exceptions, they can show extremes, they can
show, we can sort you can filter. And once you once you help people understand the
power of that, then the technical part follows. And I think that's one of the best ways in my
experience to break through and to get people Then there's, then they will come to you
and they won't say, gee, can you teach me how to do this necessarily. But I understand

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 that, that this is possible, can we talk about how to do it, and that makes it much more
accessible. But I agree with Jennifer. If people are either intimidated, or they just simply
don't want to learn this, then this is, you know, it may not be for them. It may not be for
them. It's not for every story that it the other piece of it is that data can provide a base or
a toehold for almost any kind of story. And the notion, as she said, of revealing something
of connecting with is otherwise invisible, is enormously powerful.

D Damian Radcliffe 12:01

Can you both give us some examples of some stories that either you have worked on all of
that you have read and heard, that have done this? Well, that have kind of really been
fools alive by data?

J Jennifer LaFleur 12:14

Well, there's hundreds of stories that I can think of, and a lot of it is not necessarily the
story being brought to life by data. But the very story coming to be through data. Because
a lot of a lot of really great investigations. We don't even know what the story is, until we
analyze the data to see you know, what other reporting has to be done. The data is sort of
like the first step to provide the foundation. And that gives us tips on how to go do further
reporting. So gosh, there's so many stories that I could think of, reveal my former employer
just did a whole series of stories about discrimination in home lending. But it was done by
two reporters, one who was on my data team when I was there, who he wanted to do
stories where he had to use statistical analysis. And he came in early every day to learn
those skills. And he ended up being able to analyze, you know, millions of mortgage
records and show that there was racial discrimination in many parts of the country, and
he was getting home loans. And the good thing about that we talked a little bit about, you
know, the people is when you have that data, and you have that analysis, you can then go
find people from from your data, who are kind of best examples of them.

B Brent Walth 13:40

But yeah, there are just so many examples. There's when it comes to mind, quite recently,
here in Eugene, that two of my journalism students worked on. Homelessness is a huge
problem here. There's a municipal court, where there were many people believe have
basically krim criminalized homelessness, that is to say, people are being arrested, jailed
for trespassing, or loitering or whatever it might be. The local court, to their credit,
recognized this as a problem is to have an alternative course and they call it community
court. We won't go forward with these charges, if you go through this program, and you
seek help, and you seek services and so on. And they go very large grant, and started

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 telling people, the mayor and city council almost right away, what a great job they were
doing. But they had no data to prove it. And they wouldn't give us data. And so my
students went and built a database by identifying people who've been through the
program, looked at how many people were back in court within six months or a year, in
other words, recidivism, and then look back in time and said well, what was the rate that
this cohort had been in jail were in trouble previously, and there was no change. So two
years and $200,000 spent, and there was really no impact on on the court system. There
may be imagined individuals lives, but there had not been this grand effort to try to help
people who were in court quite often. Very powerful. And that was a survey handmade
database and ways. And no matter how much they wanted to tell, you know, happy
anecdotes of individuals who were helped, and I'm sure those were true, a lot of money
gets spent. And no one was asking these questions, except two investigative journalists
here, two student journalists doing an investigation here, at the University of Oregon.

D Damian Radcliffe 15:42

And we mentioned a little bit about perhaps some of the institutional and individual
barriers to embracing or using data for some stories. What about the challenges of how
we share that with our audience?

J Jennifer LaFleur 15:58

I mean, I think, compared to when I was first doing this stuff, there are many more
opportunities to share this in unique ways and effect, putting the audience in the middle of
the story by doing interactive maps, doing searchable databases, where the readers can
actually look up something they're interested in. So I do think we're able to engage much
more with readers than we were before. So it's not just a static printed story. So for me, I
think I think there's a lot more opportunities for, for doing that.

D Damian Radcliffe 16:29

Alongside this sort of personalization mean, if you think about initiatives, like dollars for
docs, for example, from ProPublica, where you could kind of take is that kind of big issue,
and then I can apply what this means to me, you know, on a on a personal level. But do
you think audiences are also more either data savvy, or just that they're familiar with and
more comfortable now with reading and using interactive maps or kind of other forms of
data visualization? That has become much more commonplace, perhaps in our reporting?

J Jennifer LaFleur 16:55

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 Yeah, I mean, I think we're just we're all used to, like clicking around things and finding
things easily online. So I just think it's part of like the natural way most people who use
computers and a lot of it is phone now. So a lot of the searchable apps and maps you
know, people are using on their phone. So we also have to work to make it accessible on a
tiny screen.

D Damian Radcliffe 17:17

And for those people, organizations and journalists who want to incorporate more data
into their work, what are some of the things that they could perhaps be doing better? So
mobile responsiveness is a great, great example of that. But what else should we be
looking at and thinking about?

J Jennifer LaFleur 17:29

As far as giving readers data or working on database stories?

D Damian Radcliffe 17:35

I think it can be both.

J Jennifer LaFleur 17:37

So I mean, I still think there's a lot more opportunity in newsrooms to use data. I think it's
2019, I would have thought when I started doing this, like everybody would be doing data
and all their stories that said, not every story has to be a database story. It just might not
be. But there might be ways where data could enhance a story. So I think, thinking early
on in a project about the way if I have a story tip, what records or what data is going to
help me tell this whole story rather than anecdotal incidents? Which makes the story
much more powerful, and actually probably more accurate? Because the two things I've
heard might not be right. But if I can look at all that data, I can show what's really going
on.

B Brent Walth 18:35

Yeah, I would entirely agree with that. I think that one way, one way to do it, if you're a
journalist or and editor, wanting to learn what data can do for your stories, which you can
do for your readers or listeners, viewers, I would go to investigative reporters and editors,
the website, and NICAR, which is the data, journalism training wing of IRE. And look at the
stories or examples online that have been either, there's a database of 10s of thousands of

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 stories that were have been put in for contests over the years. And there are tip sheets,
and take these examples can begin to show what the capacity is. And hopefully we inspire
you to get more training, to understand how Excel works, or how to scrape data.
Screening data is essentially teaching a computer to go on to a website and gather data
in a way that isn't unusable. But at the heart of it. I think the challenge is often to know
initially what is even available. If you've had experienced, you've dealt with it, you begin to
know that will government agencies tend to keep this and they tend to keep that. When
you're first starting out, you don't really know. There's certain questions you can ask when
somebody sees us how things work? And what forms have to be filled out what process
have to be gone to who keeps track and who keeps an eye on things. And odds are that
those things will be kept in data. And the other thing is when people will say something to
you like in an interview or you hear them, you say as politely as you can, well, how do you
know that? And oftentimes it traces back to some analysis. And often at the heart of that
are the data. And as Jennifer said, get the data don't just rely on the analysis. In other
words, ask the questions that reveal how people know things, how they track things. And
at the heart of that the root of that is going to be data that you can begin to gather and
look at yourself.

D Damian Radcliffe 20:38

Jennifer, yesterday in your talk, you talked about the need to interrogate data, just like
any other source, can you just give some examples of some of those kind of interrogation
techniques we should be deployed?

J Jennifer LaFleur 20:50

Yeah, data is inherently flawed, just like people are flawed. And Simple, Simple things like
sorting your database to see if like, they're realistic ranges in dollar amounts, or, you know,
number of kids in a school, you know, most schools don't have 50,000 kids. So that might
be a red flag that there's some problems with the data. Because this all gets entered by
people, and who oftentimes are just doing it because they have to do it. And there's not a
whole lot of checking of government data. And so there's many things we need to do to
make sure what we're doing is as accurate as possible. So I spend a lot of time checking
for in consistencies. missing data is really important. We had a project the other day
where we were missing 112,000 Records, based on what the agency said should be in
there. I'm not going to do an analysis without those 112,000 Records. So things like that to
make sure your analysis is sound. And then once you've done your analysis, particularly if
it's something statistical or more complicated to bounce those findings, off some experts
to vet that before you produce the story.

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 B Brent Walth 22:04
No, I would agree with all that, in fact, some students are working on an investigative
story right now or we're anticipating the arrivals and data we've asked for from a local
agency. And we're already talking about what can they do to make sure that it's all there?
And is it what we, is what they asked for? So there's a lot of iterations. And I think that's
exactly right. Where I have seen huge mistakes in storytelling, is when somebody rushes to
print, because they think they found something in their computer, based on the data and
have not checked it have not thought about all the possibilities and look for the flaws, but
mostly gone back to the people who keep the data and say does this sound right? You just
feel right. And that's where you really begin to see the vulnerabilities.

D Damian Radcliffe 22:53

Yes, true. So Jennifer, you've been with us on campus for the past few days. What are the
key messages you want us to leave with from your visit,

J Jennifer LaFleur 23:02

I have been super impressed with the students here. They are working on some amazing
stories, and all seem really engaged in investigative reporting and data journalism. I met
one student yesterday who is double majoring in computer science and journalism. And
like me, you know, he wants to he wants to be able to combine them. And a few folks have
told him like, she should just go the computer science internship way. And I'm encouraging
him to go forth and do what he wants to do. Because I think there's lots of opportunities
for people with those skills. So very impressed at the student body here.

D Damian Radcliffe 23:42

How do you see this space evolving over the next few years, what excites you about the
future for data driven storytelling?

J Jennifer LaFleur 23:48

It's a little hard to say, because when I started out, I would have thought it was would be
so much farther along than it is. That said, I think what makes this much more accessible
today, as opposed to when we may be started doing this, there's so many open source
tools that are free to newsrooms, that you can do a lot of really sophisticated work
without having to purchase expensive software, because newsrooms don't have the
budget for that anymore. So it makes them much more accessible to lots of people.

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D Damian Radcliffe 24:20
And I guess Brent for our students and for other students who are listening to this. One of
the key messages is, this is a space where this is a skill set that people are hiring for. And
it's becoming increasingly important in newsrooms.

B Brent Walth 24:32

Absolutely, if somebody who hired a lot of stuff writers in this lot of interns from previous
job, if I knew that a young journalist comes in knowing how to work a spreadsheet, or how
to make sense of data, or had demonstrated some use of it before, a huge plus. The other
thing that we we constantly are talking about in the classroom, and when students come
back from their work in the field is verification. And making sure and more robust, not
simply taking the word of whoever you might be interviewing, but demonstrating to the
reader and to an editor who may hire you someday, you've done a little bit of extra work
to open more than a little bit, enough to make sure that that story feels solid and it's
surrounded by evidence. And data can help you do that. It'll be demonstrate that without
being overly about the numbers you can still be about the people still can be about the
struggles folks face or the tension in the community. But having that embedded, an editor
is going to spot that and that gives you a great advantage going out into the field, but
also it builds trust with readers.

D Damian Radcliffe 25:43

Great. Well thank you both very much for joining us for this discussion today. Do keep an
eye out for Jennifer's guest lecturer which you'll be able to find wherever you found this
podcast. And of course will also link to it from our website demystifying.uoregon.edu. In
the meantime, it just remains to thank my guests today Jennifer LaFleur and Brent Walth.
Until next time, thanks for listening.

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