Using Numbers to Complement Your Story
By Shellie Branco
Facilitator David Donald
is a training director
for Investigative Reporters
and Editors.
|
Most journalists have heard the wise crack that reporters choose a career in journalism to avoid math. But if you are an investigative journalist who does any form of computer-assisted reporting, you will need to understand the workings of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and Microsoft Access database management software.
David Donald, training director for Investigative Reporters and Editors, told a group of journalists attending the Western Knight Center seminar on campaign finance that reporters should think of Excel spreadsheets as “glorified calculators.” They do the dirty work of handling lots of numbers, he told them.
A database manager like Access has a different function.
“It’s a glorified filing cabinet for an investigative reporter,” he said. “It helps connect the dots more quickly and efficiently than paper files.”
It is never a good idea to go looking for a story in the numbers, Donald cautioned, rather the data is there to inform readers and provide texture to stories. But make sure the story doesn’t get bogged down in percentages and statistics - the focus should always be about people or events, not the numbers and statistics.
Donald recommends that reporters use no more than two to three statistics in a story and then work with the graphics department to illustrate additional stats.
Session participants were taken through an example of using Access to merge a table of data about campaign contributors with another table of political candidates’ names and ID numbers assigned by the Federal Election Commission. The aim was to match quickly the candidates’ names to information about their donors using a “relational database” that would connect the two tables.
In order to show who was the biggest contributor to a candidate, Donald chose the criteria he wanted to compare in an Access query: the names of contributors and amounts they gave. He eliminated data about donations of less than $500, then opted to arrange the highest and lowest contributions in descending order.
To match candidates with contributors, he took the common fields from both data tables - in this case the candidate ID number - and dragged them together in a query. He then compared the information by selecting the data field holding the candidate’s name and the data field holding the contribution amounts.
Reporters can download database-friendly campaign contributions data at the Federal Election Commission’s file transfer protocol site: ftp://ftp.fec.gov. Look for Access-compatible files with extensions .txt, .xls and .dbf. Donald advised reporters to assume there will be some mistakes in the FEC data, so it needs to be cleaned before it enters a journalist’s database.
He also emphasized that when analysing the data it should be double- and triple-checked - have co-worker take a look at the math. And that goes for all journalists, number-fearing or not.
|
