In our last Journalism Toolkit 1 class meeting, we discussed in detail Adrian Holovaty, and his concept that online journalism shouldn’t be so story-centered, but should instead consist of graphics, layers, and most importantly, underlying databases, like his Chicago crime bank.
As a journalist, I cry, here! here! And here’s why:
As a reporter, we often want a stat, a number, an elicit, unarguable fact that can simplify a story and add credence to it’s subject. It helps prove credibility to viewers.
But when academic searches turn up nada, or when a journalist doesn’t have access to a database other than the U.S. Census records, he turns to other news articles, mostly news article about research, to find something, or someone, who has research on the topic in their story.
Many a time, I’ve looked to news archives to see what studies were used in stories with similar topics to mine. To copy their work? No way. But I do try to find the name and author of a study quoted in a similar news article. They study they used might also have a stat, a number, an elicit, unarguable fact that would apply to my story. And it’s a heck of a lot easier to find stats online or in the library if I know the name and/or the author of the research and statistics I’d like to use.
But the problem often continues to unfold: You find the name of the study, and you find a link to the researcher or institution.
But If the study was released in 2004, and you’re searching in 2007, let’s say, often the site you were directed to no longer has the uploaded study, an easy series of links that lead you to the study, or even the study’s abstract to help you out. HealthGrades, a nonprofit that does research on health issues and gathers stats on the issue around the country, is one big offender that comes to mind. You can never find past copies of their research and databases.
The only place you can find numbers from their studies is in news articles. And that doesn’t float another journalist’s boat, you could say. We need the study because we’re not about to copy another journalist’s work.
But, if we looked at journalism as a group effort, we might never have this problem. And Adrian gives us prime examples of how to fix this. Make databases, give complete sets of numbers on an issue, and put them on the Web. It’s a resource for journalists. And more importantly, it’s a resource for the public, which is really what media were meant to be.
A journalist who might have have to cover crime in Chicago would be thrilled to find hard numbers and facts from Adrian’s project. And a non-journalist member of society moving into Chicago might also be extremely grateful for that information as well. It’s much easier to interpret and judge the information when it’s presented in a database form.
However, the disheartening fact is, very few newspapers use this concept. Their Web sites, in light of these conditions, are horribly ineffective and unhelpful. Most of the time, their search engines and archive searches aren’t very capable. It seems like a long shot to have them implement underlying databases, complementing their news stories.
I wonder if journalists need to turn into hunter-gatherer researchers, of sorts. Do we need to find the numbers and create the statistics? Or do we just gather information from a credible source (e.g., the police, the county clerk, the state’s Department of Health) and put it into an easy-to-use database? Perhaps a mix of the two? What kind of ethics break down the line between journalist and researcher?
I truly hope we can make changes with these online reporting ideas, but with short-changed newsroom budgets and staffs, I wonder how soon we can send out journalist hunter-gatherers, even when researchers don’t have the information we need.
