February 3, 2011 at 4:59 PM EST
Sharing our Work: Does it Make "Census"?
When we were little, sharing was a good thing, our parents said. Even if it meant Jimmy or Jane got to play with your favorite toy while you had to play with --ugh-- theirs. It's what you did, because it was right.
But enter the current media climate, and sharing seems foreign, in a world where getting the news posted ten minutes after it hits is too late.
Altogether too often, we're replicating each other's work in a race to be first. We're not doing it to bring added value to the public, but because I can't use your photo from the press conference, because then it won't be from my news organization.
And while healthy competition ensures the public has choices in the media they consume, there are certain aspects of our work that we should share.
Take the Census, for example. As a data journalist, it's really exciting. The biggest dump of official data in ten years. Talk about finding sources!
But as you start to look into it, there's a lot of cleaning, separating and conversion that has to happen before we can even start looking for stories. This cleaning also requires a certain level of expertise, both in technical ability, and just being a Census geek. Not every newsroom has people who can do this. And where the data geeks do exist, they have a limited amount of time.
Well, we just got a large chunk of that time back, as USA Today announced this week that their data team will be sharing ready-to-analyze Census data with all members of Investigative Reporters and Editors. That group's made up of journalists who will be looking at the data to help you figure out what it means for your community.
It's this kind of sharing that lets us get to the meat of the work. Anthony DeBarros, a senior database editor at USA Today, who will be performing the analysis along with Paul Overberg and Barbara Hansen, said that editors were very supportive of sharing the analyzed data. DeBarros said that's because the Census Bureau is posting it online at the same time for everyone: "Any competitive edge for a newsroom will come from what it’s prepared to do with the data – find stories, create visuals."
This is great progress. And maybe in the future, we can start to imagine sharing this kind of analysis on other data sets we're all using, to at least have the same starting point. We'll still find and present our own stories in the information, but we could reduce the barrier of entry, and save ourselves some time. Maybe we could share prepared data, and knowledge about that data, in a completely open way, even moving beyond the professional organization of data journalists.
Note that the USA Today partnership isn't releasing 'ready-for-publishing' data. There's still plenty to do. But this way, we know all IRE members, and their news organizations, at least have what we need to show up at the starting line.
We arrive at that starting line with the benefit of people who've been through this before. In fact, Overberg, widely acknowledged in the data journalism community as a Census expert, has already given a Census workshop for IRE this year.
As for me, I can organize and visualize the massive amounts of information with new techniques. But as for experience with a past Census? In 1990, while Overberg was crunching the numbers, I was...in preschool.
On the flip side, we hope there's tools for improving journalism that we can share soon, using skills and experience we have. We share, and repay each other by "paying it forward".
Yes, by letting others do the initial preparation of data, we lose out on some of the learning -- you learn more about a data set by the very act of bringing it into your database system. But the real challenge is figuring out what to do with the data and how to present it.
This is real work that's still tough, and best left to individual organizations that know their audience.
Put these pieces together, and we all benefit, by getting access to more interesting journalism, employing multiple storytelling forms, that help us understand the changing demographics of our world.
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