People say the best way to learn new skills is to just start doing them, but just starting to do it on minkoffcodingadventures.com isn’t quite enough for you. You want to get out there, but you want help. I have good news for you, there’s a place where you will build these projects, take ownership for them, but benefit from the support of a range of good folks. I’m sure there are others, too, but one of these places is in a building on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles — they call it the LA Times. I call it my first paid journalistic home.

The description for the application doesn’t come up if you type in “data journalism internship” on Google. But look here and you’ll see a position for a data application producer intern. (Say that ten times fast. When I was there they called it “Data/Web/Programming intern”. This is better.)

Ideally, you’ve soaked up all you can when it comes to HTML, CSS and Javascript as well. You’ve dabbled in frameworks, or used them extensively. You want to code for journalism. You want to make the most of data. You want to work with people who share those goals. You won’t get 40 daily story clips at the end of the summer, you’ll get a few clips. But those clips — which is an archaic word — will be carefully-constructed data-driven apps.

This is where I spent March to October of 2010. I created campaign contribution applications, a sidecar to an investigative project on redevelopment, and relaunched the website’s bestsellers presence. Plus, I got to pitch in on some smaller projects, and assist with the big guns of the LAT’s news apps awesomeness — projects like Crime L.A., a mapping application that automatically takes in crime feeds, presents the data and analyzes where the largest spikes are. Projects like the Homicide Report, that track the, well, homicides in the region.

There’s not really a typical schedule to the day. Occasional meetings, but primarily, you sit at your desk and do good work. It can, and should, take months to do an application right. Friday afternoon data meetings typically involve wine –very California.

If you want to go to the LA Times because it’s a big name, good for you. If you want to go for the city of Los Angeles, and California life, that’s another good reason. But if that’s all you care about, you’re missing the best part. That would be the team known as the Data Desk, that you get to collaborate with.

Want to learn about the intricacies of data analysis? Talk to the analysts. Want to get to know the reporters who file the entries that fill the Homicide Report blog with stories, and hear about what happened at the coroner’s office? They’re there. But your closest contacts will be Ben Welsh and Ken Schwencke (who I interviewed here before I even applied for the internship).

They’re Web developers, and journalists. Wait, do they do the backend work of structuring data in Django models, or the front-end work of creating robust templates to present that data? Both. You will, too, if you join them. They’re eager to help, take their work very seriously, and are always looking for ways to improve the projects of the Data Desk. They help you improve, answer your questions, rejoice in your successes, support you when you could have done better.

The data culture is already instilled at the LA Times. Management, reporters, analysts, developers, they all know what you can do, even when you don’t know what you can do. It’s just that there’s so much, more people are needed. You won’t be bored, you will be valued. And you won’t have to explain why this type of journalism is important, becuase for the most part, it’s just accepted. You can’t find that everywhere, which is why it’s worth treasuring when you can get it.

When I was looking into this internship, I was googling around to find a post like this, hear a bit about someone’s experience. Didn’t exist then, which is why I’m writing this. Now it exists. It’s hard to find because the Data Desk is only a few years old, and its other intern is Ken Schwencke, who works there permanently now. I went from the LA Times to PBS. The LAT can’t make your career, but gives you resources you can take advantage of. Approach it the right way, and you have a stronger possibility of achieving your dream. Only you know what that means.

So, after your time there, you’ll be as prepared as you can be to walk into another newsroom somewhere in the country, and bring the data and programming. It’ll help you bridge the gap between wishing you could do it, and just getting it done.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely, without a doubt.

If you’re interested, you should apply via this link, and reach out to Ben and Ken with questions (find them on Twitter at @palewire and @schwanksta.) And if you have questions about my experience there, I’d love to chat about it.

Explore other posts:

• December 28, 2011 -- Adventures in rebooting my coding practice
• January 16, 2012 -- A pilgramage to NY headquarters
• May 3, 2010 -- Note to self: Real world journo-coding lessons
• February 27, 2012 -- Teaching Materials from NICAR 2012
• April 5, 2009 -- NYTimes Global Edition — do people care? Should they?
• March 18, 2010 -- My next move: LA Times!

But I wouldn’t be able to attempt half of my experiments without the support of another community – NICAR. The acronym stands for “National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.” But I just call them “my people.” Without them, I wouldn’t be at PBS right now.

Sure, data journalism/teaching yourself programming is hard. Luckily, people who’ve been attempting this with far more success and wisdom than I could ever muster are willing to help. And they don’t just want to help if you become obsessed. I’ve long said not every journo should be a data geek, but we all should at least be aware of what data journ is. Enter hundreds of mentors who specialize in analyzing and presenting data, all in service of the story. I consider them my role models, my friends, my community, who help me reach as far as I’m willing to push myself.

So, if you ask how I got started with programming, the answer isn’t just some great tutorial or book. It’s the encouragement of people who care, who listen to new ideas, who are invested. Just show them energy, enthusiasm and a willingness to work hard, and reap the rewards. You’ll never know what the community can give you until you try it on for size.

Come join the learning party, in person, at NICAR’s annual conference!

Why should you bother heading to Raleigh in late Feb.?

1. It’s where your future employers and colleagues are. It’s where I first met Ben Welsh and Doug Smith, who interviewed me for an internship that would allow me to pursue a part of journalism I’d fallen in love with — hard.

2. It’s the annual gathering of the people who help me every day online, whether I’m talking directly to them, reading their blog posts, listening to podcasts of their classes on iTunes as I ride the subway to work. If you think journalism needs to move beyond the status quo, you’ll find like company. It is a validation, a homecoming, an inspiring indescribable feeling to see the NICARians face-to-face. You just can’t get that in <=140 char.

3. Some sessions are more formal, some less so. My favorites are the hands-on labs, where we don’t just talk about how you should learn a certain technique, you get started doing it, under the guidance of someone more experienced at that skill.

My first exposure to NICAR was in a CAR class where our professor (if you don’t know who I’m talking about by now, read another post on this blog — okay, it’s Willis) showed us a problem a journo was having and posted to the NICAR-L listserv. It was then I realized that Derek, and his friend Matt Waite, weren’t the only people in this field — but there was a whole group of them.

Fast forward a year, and I’m delighted to announce that I was approached to speak on a NICAR panel — and lead a hands-on lab. Convinced Matt Wynn of the Omaha World-Herald to join me on the first one, because frankly, I’m intimidated as heck. I’ll be talking about how you can scrape the web using tools that don’t require programming. I’ve never said everyone needs to learn programming, I just don’t think anyone should be dissuaded from it. But if you don’t want Python right now, and you do want Web scraping, to find your own data set, let’s do it. You don’t have to wait till your skills are super advanced to get that great story.

I could say being asked to speak at NICAR isn’t a big deal, and I don’t care, but that’s not true. I care a lot. I’m next to people who have walked me every step along my journey so far. People I really have no right to be mixed in with. People who’ve been doing this for years. People who, well, aren’t 24. People who didn’t graduate in March. But this Web scraping for non-programmers thing is a topic I’ve discussed before; people seemed to like it. I’m afraid I won’t have anything to say. But if you know me, I suppose that isn’t really a concern, right?

So do me a favor, whether or not you consider yourself a “data journo.” Consider coming to the conference this year. You don’t have to do data every day, but as it becomes more prevalent, it’ll be a part of your job. You can learn as much or as little as you want from sessions geared toward various levels of geekery. You’ll learn even more from random chats in the hall. And you’ll learn enough to know what data-crazed folks might be able to do for your organization. And maybe, someday, you’ll tweet about what you’re working on, and folks from ProPublica, the St. Pete Times and the New York Times will all respond on how you should approach it, and what you should read — all unsolicited (happened to me the other day). Please, check out the website. There’s something there for you, I promise.

You’ll find sessions at NICAR for whatever your skillset is. You’ll meet people you can call on for life to help you push those skills forward. You’ll geek out, make new friends. You’ll find passionate journos willing to answer questions, who will respect your ideas, no matter your experience, or lack thereof.

If you have any questions about the NICAR conference or organization, let me know. We need more newbies, more veterans, more everyones. What do we have in common? Pushing new ideas, thinking about things a little bit differently.

And as for me? I’ll be the one hanging on everyone’s every word, energetically proposing my own ideas, always with a giant grin on my face. Why? ‘Cause they’re my people. They’re your people, too.

Explore other posts:

• February 5, 2012 -- How To Count Queried Rows in a Google Fusion Table
• February 1, 2010 -- Relating zip codes and geography using Processing
• December 30, 2009 -- Changes in how we travel across U.S. borders
• January 18, 2010 -- Committing fact errors in visualizations
• January 19, 2010 -- Changes in the numbers of students majoring in programming and social sciences
• July 11, 2010 -- First LAT app (or the butterfly on my windowsill)

That’s why I absolutely loved last week’s post by TBD’s Steve Buttry on this isssue. Read it, seriously. I was going to write up my comments, but I’ve got something better.

I started discussing this issue with my father Mike Minkoff, who happened to be in town last week. And he helped me realize the struggle our education finds itself in, well, it’s nothing new.

Mike is a computational scientist at Illinois’ Argonne National Laboratory, using his cs skills to enhance the work of his fellow scientists, and enables them to explore problems whose complexity or sheer magnitude is beyond the reach of mere humans. It’s applying tech skills to another field. And that’s a little bit like what we do as journo-programmers, bring the cs to the journalism.

But when he was going to school, computer science curricula weren’t all that certain. And we can learn from that transition. I’ll let him take it away.

I am a computational scientist with an interest in data in journalism. I find a number of exciting and interesting parallels between the current evolution of journalism as discussed in this post and the early history of the field of computer science when I went to grad school in the 1960s.

I studied computer science at the undergraduate level through Ph.D. between 1963 and 1973 at the University of Wisconsin and Princeton University. During that time, there were relatively few schools that had curricula in computer science (Cal Tech, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and a few others) and the programs were principally at the graduate level. In fact, schools didn’t always call it “Computer Science” — some of the courses were listed as “Programs in Numerical Analysis,” as at Wisconsin.

There are two points I’d like to comment on:

1. In the 1960s, as computer science programs developed there was a fundamental debate regarding what should be taught and where. On the one hand, grad students and faculty felt that learning a programming language was of utmost importance in order to get a job after graduation. On the other hand, others felt that theory is more important so the student can develop and move with the technology rather than become stagnant as technology advanced. Later on, the theory approach justified the placement of computer science in major universities rather than trade schools. There is a parallel here to the “basics” vs. “technology” issue in journalism.

   As this debate developed, the professional societies (notably the Association for Computing Machinery) established a committee to define a core curriculum of an B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. and allow for electives that could be locally defined by the institution. The courses in the core represented the key areas of computer science and are reflected in their decendents today in simulation and modeling, data analysis and operating systems theory:

   • numerical analysis and mathematical optimization
   • systems programming
   • artificial intelligence and automated reasoning

   Of course these are historical topics and just as the technology used in journalism will develop in new ways, so did these areas.

   As to the theory vs. language issue the obvious answer is both. In all fields, as the subject advances there are always new topics to integrate into a curriculum. I would expect that a journalist be as good a writer as in the past, but also he or she must know how to utilize the technology of today (and tomorrow). I would hope that in the rush to move with technology the programs and faculty of traditional journalism is not neglected. There is the danger of being so committed to technology that the core of basic journalism is lost.

2. One of the most exciting parallels to me has lasted my career. The pioneers of computer science were my teachers, mentors and lifelong friends and advisors just as the present digital journalism teachers and mentors are for their students. Graduate school is not just a spoon-fed set of courses, but a place where inquiry and learning can be nurtured. One of the commonalities of computer science of the 1960s and the technology journalism of today is that once in a generation a field provides the opportunity to meet and learn from the people who created the field. This gives the mentor and student to opportunity to rise to the challenge of working in a new and growing field. While students in both areas need to decide for themselves what they want to get out of a career, for me it is exciting to meet and learn from the people who created the field. As a student, I felt that the difference between studying math and computer science was that you could meet and talk with the developers and authors of the textbooks. Of course today it is the blog rather than the textbook, I guess!

I thought this was definitely something to ponder, and I hope that in a generation, I’ll be the one telling my children about the parallels between what we consider modern journalis, and some new transition their field is going through.

Has this gotten you thinking, too? That’s what the comments section is for!

Related posts you might enjoy:

• April 7, 2010 -- Columbia’s new joint MS: Good start, but no panacea
• January 31, 2010 -- Data Delver: Matt Waite, St. Petersburg Times
• November 24, 2009 -- A letter to journo-programmers: Teach me, inspire me

Tomorrow, Wed. Sept. 8, we’ll be discussing “Finding the story in the data” at #wjchat, and I have been tapped to host. (One might ask why, they must really be running low on people….I kid, I kid.)

This issue is extremely important, and one that must be addressed by the Web journalism groups. There’s a difference between telling a journalistic story, but lacking the data and displaying data in an aesthetically pleasing way that doesn’t really tell a story. The best data journalism does both. It’s rare, and I believe we all need to work harder at doing more of it. A tall order for someone to do alone, or even a team, but if the community puts its collective head together, we’ve got a better shot.

I couldn’t be more excited to discuss some of the issues I’ve been spending much of the last year internalizing. I have some better ideas about this now than I did back last September, I hope, but it’s also one of my favorite topics to ponder, because there are so many ideas I know I haven’t considered. I hope to report back with a nice compilation of links and thoughts once we tap into the community’s knowledge, but for now, I’m just spreading the word.

If you read this blog, but aren’t familiar with #wjchat, it’s a gathering on Twitter on Wednesday evenings where we discuss various aspects of online journalism. It ranges from social media, to video, to how to get a job, to data. I love all the facets of journalism, so it’s a great way to guarantee yourself some great conversation and learning all wrapped up into one package. At 5 Pacific, 8 Eastern, on Wednesday, that’s tomorrow, just hop on over to Twitter and follow the hashtag #wjchat. I find it easier to follow via tweetchat.com, which gives you a little chatroom that has a nicer interface than twitter.com — the conversation can get fast and furious.

In the meantime, if there are specific topics you’d like to see discussed, or questions you’d like asked, get at me before, or during the chat.

And if you’re one of my dear NICARian mentors, it’d be really fantastic if you could find the time to drop by. Anything I’ve picked up in my career thus far is minimal, and I owe it all to the collective wisdom of those who’ve taught me what I know as a journalist and a programmer.

See you in the virtual space!

Explore other posts:

• March 25, 2010 -- Self-teaching data and programming skills
• February 15, 2010 -- Visual confections are more than mere presentation
• April 5, 2010 -- Women with coding skills are no Passover miracle
• June 13, 2010 -- Post IRE wrap-up + shameless self-promotion
• February 12, 2010 -- Exploring Drupal — open source tool of the day
• January 29, 2010 -- Data Delver: Perry Swanson, The Gazette

So, there’s that. First launch!

My checklist:

• Figure out what part of journalism inspires me. CHECK (Data, programming)
• Find place where I can learn about it from others, but have freedom to try out my ideas and learn from knowledgeable and patient folks. CHECK (LAT)
• Use this opportunity to learn enough about programming to create at least one app. CHECK (See first line of post)

That was a good time.

I’m planning a post on best practices for creating a searchable database application like this, with examples, and technical geekery, and all that, and I’d love your thoughts in the meantime.  Let me know if you have specific questions.

But in a moment of self-reflection, I’d just like to say this.

I was sitting in my apartment this morning, and found that a butterfly had somehow gotten in (blame a broken screen, maybe).  It sat on my windowsill, facing the outside world.  It would feel around the window, trying to find an opening.  After circling the perimeter of the window, it laid back down, almost motionless, just searching.  An hour later, the cycle repeated.  Wanting to help the poor butterfly, after watching it struggle, I tried to capture it in a small box to take it downstairs.  It was too smart for that.  Fine.  What actually worked?  Covering all the windows and opening the balcony door.  You can’t force the butterfly out, even though you’re helping, it had to find the path out on its own.

Why do I bring this up?  Am I slowly going insane after spending the day with Dive Into Python (rec’d)?  Perhaps. But I have a point.

Let’s take the common journalist, yearing to know more about data-driven apps.  (I can’t be the only one, I just can’t!)  I search for the answers, voraciously read, alternate between laying still while observing the space and wandering around the perimeter, feeling it out, trying to dip my toe in the water.  I jump into the pool, head-first, realize it’s not working.  Can’t do it on my own.  Many people who’ve already made the journey try to help.  But they just can’t just give me the knowledge, can’t just take me to my goal, can’t just make it happen.  They must lead me there, give me the same resources they used.  Recommend the books, the sites. But in the end, I’ve got to find my own way out of the house, the prison of not knowing enough coding basics to begin.  Pushes in the right direction, guiding me away from those false starts, this is essential.

I’d just like to take a moment to thank the experts, who guide me away from the false starts, who don’t give up when I keep turning the wrong way.  In particular, in terms of the programming skills I’m learning, it’s Ben Welsh (who I happen to have been working most closely with), who exercises that kind of patience.  Who never tells me not to fly into that closed window, because while it was closed for him, I might discover a way to get out.  Of course, I don’t, and he’s no less interested in helping me get back on course. Thanks!

Still a long way to go.  So, what’s changed?  Now, I’ve gotten outside.  I made my first app.  When someone asks me what steps make up a project, how long it’ll take, I can give a legitimate answer, or know how to find one.

I still remember wondering if I could ever build an application.  And Derek said to me, “There’s only one way to find out.”  Derek, who I used to bug on a daily basis about this stuff.  Derek, who I haven’t asked a Python/Django question of since March.  I’m the LAT’s problem now!

Well, as Derek said, find out we did.  Time to push it further, I say.

There’s a whole world to explore now that I’ve escaped being stuck inside.  LAT folks, prepare yourself, the questions you’ve seen so far are only the beginning.

Explore other posts:

• February 27, 2012 -- Teaching Materials from NICAR 2012
• January 18, 2009 -- How much video is too much video?
• February 20, 2010 -- Data Delver: Chase Davis, California Watch
• December 28, 2011 -- Adventures in rebooting my coding practice
• January 30, 2010 -- Parallelism: Packing information into visualization
• February 13, 2010 -- Data Delver: Mo Tamman, Wall Street Journal

I’ll just put it this way.  Andy, you’ve been an inspiration.  Watching your work while I was a student at Medill, and how much you enjoyed it, I knew some day I could do anything, if I could just set my mind to it, and find supportive mentors.

It’s a parallel thing.  Andy gets Matt Waite and Jeremy Bowers at the Times of the Southeast (St. Pete), I get Ben Welsh and Ken Schwencke at the Times of the Southwest (LA).  Match good mentors with journalistic enthusiasm and obsession, and you’ll get somewhere!

We both get to bring passion, skill and journalistic knowhow to the table.  We bug the people with the tech knowledge until we have a moment like this.   Maybe someday I’ll report in the field and code like Andy does.  But for now, my reporting consists of investigating the nuances of the still-large ship that is the LA Times, and looking at how it can be even better.  And at this point in time, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

It seems appropriate to post this interview with Andy now (Yes, I’m making excuses for delaying this for months and months….).  I chatted with him in March, just after the launch of his first Django app – MyLawmaker.  And I just launched my first one about two weeks ago.

I started these Data Delver interviews knowing no one in the field other than Derek Willis.  (And if you only got to know one person, he’s as good as it gets.)  And now, I feel like I know so many more.  And for some reason, I get to be a part of their ranks each day.  It’s a privilege, an honor, and an adrenaline rush like no other.

I’ll let Andy take it away in his own words now.

This transcript of my interview with Boyle is a part of my continuing series I’m calling “Data Delvers,” where I pass on transcripts, summaries, quotes and audio clips from conversations with journalists using technology to find, analyze and convey data-driven stories and/or projects to the modern audience.

Extended transcript

Why is having an understanding of data important?
When we have meetings to discuss story ideas with the group I work with we mainly focus on breaking news on the web.  When somebody says something, it’s really nice to be able to go, “Oh, I know how they keep those records so I know exactly how you can ask questions to find out how many total XXX has happened this year.”  It really helps to have a background, it gives you a chance to dig deeper and get more context.

Is St. Pete working to get other reporters to get more up to speed on this?
I think there’s quite a few reporters who do have this type of skill or do have the basics.  They can use Excel; they can use Microsoft Access.  Actually, there’s a reporter who did a really awesome story on leaky underground storage tanks and where they are located.  My compadre, Darla Cameron, does a lot of GIS stuff, so she’s also a data nerd, like me. She was able to help him with that. A lot of people use databases on a pretty average basis and have some CAR training, but not as much huge stuff like the Wetlands project that the St. Pete Times did with Matt Waite and Craig Pittman a few years ago.  But things on a smaller scale are happening.

Going back to the MyLawmaker project, what was the genesis of that?
The genesis is that on Monday the state legislature starts so we print this thing every year in our Perspectives section which runs every Sunday.  We print opinion pieces and stuff like that in a section called ‘For a better Florida’.  One of our politics editors, Amy Hollyfield,  had sent an email out to one of the higher-ups  saying that there’s this project from the New York Times called Represent and another one at Oregon Live –  Your Government, where you type in your address and it shows you your state lawmakers, congressmen, city lawmakers, etc.  She asked if it would be possible for us to set up something to help people find their state representatives and state senators from their address?  This somehow made it to me and I go, “Yeah, yeah, that can be done; it’s possible.”  At that point I had no clue in my mind of how we were going to do that, but I knew it was possible because obviously someone else could do it. So we had the shape files; Darla already had the information.  Somehow we could write a program that would geocode your address and would ask what you wanted to see, and it would print out what you wanted.

So that was basically last Thursday and it is now Friday and we are ready to launch.  Thursday, about 3:30 in the afternoon, it was like, “Hey guys, do you think you can do this?”  I was taught a long time ago that if you think you can, try it. This is something that I really wanted to do.  It was an opportunity to try this stuff   I’ve been working on.  I’ve been working on some Django and Python with Matt Waite and Jeremy Bowers, so it was nice to spearhead a project and have ownership on something and work with a group of awesome people like Darla and Lee.  I’m really jazzed.

So how did you start getting into Django…just by being around Matt and Jeremy?
Yeah, that’s totally it.  He’ll [Matt Waite] browbeat you into believing what he believes.  When I went to the Indianapolis NICAR conference he had a thing, a bootcamp, for three or four of the days on frameworks, so that was Django and the basics of it.  And I remember when he showed it,  I thought, “Man, that’s way easier than making hundreds of  individual web pages and then having to edit the HTML in each one. “ I remember being a kid and having an AOL members’ web page and how horrible it was to have to update every single HTML file and I thought “Wow!  This is something that automatically creates this stuff.   That is sweet.   I need to learn this.” And that was in March of last year.

And then after that it was just me attempting to learn stuff and breaking everything and being really afraid that I’d destroy my computer and not becoming afraid of the terminal. It was a very long process.  There were a couple of projects over the summer that I worked on.  One was FCAT, which is an aptitude test given to students in public schools in Florida. We were able to make a searchable database for that.  I wrote the models on that, and then they did the rest of the heavy lifting.  I guess that was the first project I had any sort of help with.  Then we later had a project for high school sports, called Home Team, which is totally awesome.  I was able to see the inner workings  and it was really cool to see the process of how they were developing it and how it was being set up.  I wanted to build something, so when the opportunity came along for MyLawmaker, I jumped at the chance to do it.

So what did you end up using for the geocoding?
We used Google.    There’s a limit of 2,500 times per IP in a 24 hour period which is an issue if you hope to get a lot of hits on  your website.   So what we do is we actually pass it off to JavaScript on the client side, so the server’s IP address comes from the user’s computer. Not that we expect 2,500 hits a day, but we have no clue as to how many hits it will get.   But we thought it’d be nice just in case.  We don’t want people trying to use it and it’s broken.

Have you had requests from the community for anything like this?  It doesn’t have to be specifically MyLawmaker, but just more interactive stuff?
I think a lot of people really like it.  When our FCAT project launched in the summer, it got a ton of use.   It still kind of does.  A lot of those projects that are usually attached to stories initially get a lot of hits.  With a project like this once we told some of our colleagues about it, they were like  “Wow, that’s a great idea.” With the state senate website, you can only search by zip code.   Then it will tell you the districts that are in that zip code and you have to click on that and see if you are located on a little map of the district, so ours is actually a little better than part of the state legislature’s.  But I guess that’s the goal.  We want to make sure that people can find the information and find whom to call if they have an issue.   A lot of people were quite surprised…they didn’t believe who their state legislators were.  Said, “That can’t be true.”  But it was, and they wouldn’t have known otherwise.

Why do you see this type of work as important?
It’s interactive.  When you pick up a newspaper, you read a story and it kind of ends there.  What’s really cool about this is it helps you find out broader information.  You can go searching a given database online and become more aware of your community. That’s part of what we do, as journalists, and as news organizations, we try to inform the public.  To do it in a way that’s automated, that doesn’t require our constant supervision or our constant writing of stories, helps because it frees up time for us to do other stuff.  It still gives people information and more context when it comes to stories.  I believe that a well-informed populace is much better than an ill-informed populace.  It’s also really cool and lots of fun to do.

Do you enjoy living in both worlds – the reporting and the developing aspects?  What are the advantages and disadvantages?
Yes, I do.  I guess time is a disadvantage in everything we do.  Part of it is because of the reporting, I can come up with projects that we can do.  I think if I was only a code monkey and I was never out on the streets, I wouldn’t find out what data is available or what data we can build on our own. It also helps you keep track of the news.  Like this is being built in response to the fact that the state legislature is meeting on Monday to start a new session. If I was just a reporter, I wouldn’t be aware of different ways to think and inform the public.  And if I was just a developer, I would be a little blind to some of the opportunities that there are to inform the public, and make cool stuff.

Any other advice?
Something I wish I’d been told when I was younger is failure happens, especially with this sort of stuff, so you really need to get used to it, and we all fail.  Your failure is a failure, unless you learn.  Then, your failure becomes a win.  If you’re always trying to learn stuff, as a journalist, if you’re always working to develop different skill sets, whether it’s Web development, normal computer-assisted reporting, GIS, narrative storytelling, it all helps you, it all helps the other things.  Whatever new skill you learn in journalism will add to your big palette of rocking.

Would you recommend all or more reporters get into the coding side of things?
It doesn’t hurt.  It doesn’t hurt to understand the basics of data.  If you’re a city hall reporter, it helps to know basic Excel, it helps to know Access. There’s a ton of cool stuff you can do because of it.  If you are a feature writer, and you write longer narratives, and stuff like that, you can still find stories through databases, you can still find extra people to interview through those methods.  It helps in every aspect I think, just to have a little bit.  Whereas I have made the intense plunge into being a total nerd when it comes to this stuff, if that’s what you want to do, that’s what you want to do.  I don’t think that should be a requirement, but I think you should have at least the bare bones basics of what’s going on, because knowledge is power, and knowing is half the battle.

Related posts you might enjoy:

• April 11, 2010 -- Data Delver: Paul Monies, The Oklahoman
• April 5, 2010 -- Women with coding skills are no Passover miracle
• April 5, 2010 -- Data Delver: Phil Meyer
• March 28, 2010 -- Data Delver: Mark Schaver, Louisville Courier
• March 8, 2010 -- Data Delver: Anthony DeBarros, USA Today
• March 8, 2010 -- Data Delver: Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica

One of the areas in journalism most ripe for data work, as I see it, is enterprise stories.  At papers with small CAR staffs, there’s often a serious strain on the time of CAR reporters and editors seeking to provide context and fodder for long-term projects, often investigative, and enhance shorter one-off daily pieces, often breaking news.  Spend too much time on one area, you’re neglecting the other.  At the Seattle Times, one editor is called the Data Enterprise Editor, and her time is largely based in project work, that breaks out of the daily story routine.  She works to include interactivity on the website, from searchable databases to Google maps.  And she works with a group of reporters focusing on suburban areas, that are too often undercovered.

It’s her job to organize and foster collaboration across the newsroom, to create the best data-based stories and projects possible.  The woman who holds this title?  The Seattle Times’ Cheryl Phillips.

This interview with Phillips is a part of my continuing series I’m calling “Data Delvers,” where I pass on summaries, quotes, transcripts and audio clips from conversations with journalists using technology to find, analyze and convey data-driven stories and/or projects to the modern audience.

Bolding within Phillips’ answers denote some of the quotes I found most interesting.

Please describe your role as Data Enterprise Editor.

The data enterprise work is basically me and a small team, two other people. We focus on computer-assisted reporting, and then try to take that CAR work a step further and do some interactivity online with it, like a searchable database, whether it’s a Flash piece, interactive map, or database. The stories vary, some are longer projects, some are, “Let’s just create this Google map for a feature piece.” That has nothing to do with investigative journalism, but it creates a more interactive environment for the paper. That takes a big chunk of my time. The other thing that takes an almost equal amount of time would be that I’m an editor for a team of three reporters that cover suburban communities. We try to make them pretty mobile, so they’re out often, but the idea is that they do enterprise. It’s not like a daily suburban story. It’s like, outside the city, what’s going on, what are the issues of note. One of my reporters is doing a big piece about all these revised floodmaps that are coming out, and what the impact is going to be on these rural communities.

When did you start?

I’ve been doing this job a year and a half, since Sept. ’08.

How long has the paper been doing suburban reporting?

We used to have an East Side bureau, but then, when we had cutbacks, we eliminated that bureau. We also had another bureau covering the suburbs to the north. So, this is an effort to make sure that we don’t forget about those suburban communities which still want to be covered, but we can’t cover every city council meeting, so we cover important news that matters. We can give a sense of place for our readers by telling these stories.

Can you tell me about your career path to the Seattle Times?

I’ve been all over the place. I started in the ’80s back in Texas, then I went to Montana, which is my home state, and I worked for a small Gannett paper there [Great Falls Tribune]. I was on loan to USA Today for about half a year. Got back in ‘95. Then I went to the Detroit News and was a CAR projects editor there. I went from there to USA Today, and was a database editor. You probably heard the story about how I left USA Today. I was fired for touching a piece of artwork, along with two other people. I did a project for Dateline on drunken driving, and then I was hired by the Seattle Times.

Can you pinpoint any marked differences between broadcast investigative work for Dateline vs. print reporting?

It was stunning to me, the difference. I hadn’t truly recognized it. I did a lot of work for this Dateline project special. The editor from Dateline did a lot of work, too. They did a lot of filming focusing on one woman who was hit by a drunken driver, and her recovery. I spent months analyzing data from four different suburban metropolitan areas, looking at sentences for manslaughter where someone had also received a DUI for vehicular manslaughter when they were sober. The result we found was that if you also had a DUI, you got the lighter sentence on average, so you got penalized more for being sober than you did for being drunk, which is kind of stunning, and it boiled down to two sentences on air. I could have written an entire newspaper article about that, but it was important for them. They were willing to spend the time to invest in my work, but it was just a piece of this visual narrative, so it was very different.

What is it that drew you to CAR in the first place?

I just felt like there were stories that were going untold, that you could tell if you understood what was happening in bigger swaths of information. You could use these technologies and tools and become a better reporter. One of my very first projects was really simple, it wasn’t a big chunk of data. I used a Lotus spreadsheet to analyze the partnership agreement for the Texas Rangers, back when George W. Bush was one of the owners of the team, to figure out how much he would get if he sold the team, and how much everyone else would get. It was a formula, so I had to use a spreadsheet to do it. It was the first time I’d been exposed to that. I had a CPA friend who helped me with it. And I was like “Oh, wow, I can actually do this,” and it was kind of amazing. It opened a new world for me and it kind of went on from there.

What’s your role in IRE?

I’m chairman of the board at IRE, and I’m a past president.

What’s fueled your involvement in that organization?

I wouldn’t have learned anything had it not been for IRE. I started going to conferences in the mid-‘90s, and I would have gone earlier if I had known about the organization. My first conference was when I was in Montana, and I was on loan to USA Today, and my paper from Montana didn’t really have the money to send me to a conference, and the other database editors at USA Today basically said, “Well, yeah, I’ll share a room with you. My point is, I had no money and a whole slew of people took care of me, from sharing rooms to not letting me buy meals, and it was really stunning. So, I ended up rooming with someone from USA Today, and literally, no one would let me buy anything . It was just great, and I learned a ton, and I saw what was possible.

I went back to my small Montana paper and started to incorporate that into my work, and turned out some pretty good stories that I couldn’t have done otherwise. So, my involvement in IRE has come because I wanted to make sure that other people could have that same experience, and produce some great journalism based on what they learned.

As far as the future of CAR, do you see this as a skill more reporters will be required to have? Do you see it more as the role of a CAR specialist?

There will always be a role for a CAR specialist, now more than ever, really. I hope more reporters will gain basic computer-assisted reporting skills, that they will all know how to use a spreadsheet, they will know how to calculate percentage change, basic stuff, especially as we try to develop searchable applications. But when it comes to dealing with really complex data sets, you’ve got to spend some real time in that world. Because, if you don’t use these skills often, then you lose that. I’m an example of that. It’s been a few years since I even used ArcView mapping programs, I’m pretty slow and clunky now and it’s because I haven’t had a need to do that, to use that map expertise. So I go to my CAR specialist, and I have him do it, because unless I’m going to be doing it all the time, I need him to make sure it doesn’t get screwed up.

I have reporters who don’t do it all the time, they’re not CAR specialists, but they do have computer-assisted reporting skills. I think the balance is that they do the work, which is great, and I want them to keep doing that work, but it gets run by a specialist or by me, to make sure that somebody checks that analysis, just to be doubly sure. Anyway, we always check, but it’s especially important when it’s someone who doesn’t use high-level CAR on an everyday basis.

How do you decide which projects are worthy of interactive and/or searchable database treatment?

I think it depends on a couple of things. It’s similar, I think, to how the graphics department thinks about the graphics that they do for the paper. Do they aid the reader in a better or deeper understanding of the story? That’s one piece of it. Another piece of it is: Would the reader be interested in more information? On the Web site, in a text file or just in the paper? A lot of people are often interested in diving down into the numbers, that’s something which I think can help with greater transparency. If it’s one where you think someone would be interested in those numbers, or it would tell them something useful, create a database for it. If it’s not, if you don’t think people are going to go to it, if they’re not going to be interested, or if it doesn’t illuminate in some way, then we don’t do it.

How is this work broken down at the Seattle Times?

Another part of the Data Enterprise piece of my job is that I work across departments. It may be that the business editor is having a reporter working on a story about home values. So, she’ll come to me and say, “Hey, do this with us. We can create something online,” and she’ll say something about what they’re trying to achieve. Then, I’ll go to the online department, and I’ll say “What resources do we have if we create this searchable interface? Can you do some design with it, or give it some extra treatment?” It’s sort of a collaborative conversation. Also, depending on the level of time involved, I think about if it would take our CAR specialist, or me, x amount of time, because we also have this project coming. It’s really a mix. We’re very collaborative, we talk about everything.

Do you try to bring all the departments in at the outset of a project?

Yes. Pretty much. In ’09, we did an interactive Flash map, it was an environmental graphic. We won the James V. Risser Prize for environmental journalism, Justin Mayo was the CAR specialist on it. We did this really nice thing that took quite a bit of time, it was very complex. We had brought in everyone from the beginning. The photographer was there, two reporters, Justin, and another reporter. And we had the Flash guy involved from the very beginning. We took a look at logging permits, and kind of showed how there was flood damage in particular areas that had been logged heavily. We ended up using these maps, we were creating these maps for our reporting use, to say, “Oh, look, here’s this hazard zone.” We found ourselves using it so much as a reporting tool that it dawned on us, in part because we had the Flash guy involved from the beginning, that we really needed to put this online. If we use it to help us understand a pretty complex subject, then it really would help the reader.

Speaking of readers, what feedback have you gotten from the community to this sort of work?

I don’t get a lot of phone calls, or things like that. They respond to our stories saying, “Thanks for getting this information,” or “Gee, I’m really glad I can look this up.” That’s really about the extent of it. I would say more feedback comes in the way of traffic, and our searchable databases get some pretty good traffic. Even something simple. We did election results, where we created a quick searchable database for the elections, and that got an incredible amount of traffic. You could go to the various counties, and see what those counties were doing, and people seemed to like having it all brought together in one spot.

Related posts you might enjoy:

• January 11, 2010 -- Importance of combining data analysis with context (reflections on readings from week two)
• April 11, 2010 -- Data Delver: Paul Monies, The Oklahoman
• March 29, 2010 -- Using Javascript for interactive Google charts
• March 24, 2010 -- Bringing data journalism into curricula
• March 18, 2010 -- My next move: LA Times!
• February 21, 2010 -- Is a flat text file or a database right for an app?

I just needed something to do with my ever abundant free time, obviously.

Alright, since we know that’s not true, the real reason is that it will help spread the data journalism message.  There are a lot of skills to learn, and a lot of questions to be answered.  The more of us intelligently exploring these options, the better off we all are.

Plus, it’s fun, and a way to keep writing even as I spend my working days coding.

If you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to be explored, please get at me.

Explore other posts:

• January 20, 2011 -- Universities should apply expertise to explain complex topics
• July 29, 2011 -- The Associated Press: Next stop on the journey
• November 24, 2009 -- A letter to journo-programmers: Teach me, inspire me
• June 13, 2010 -- Post IRE wrap-up + shameless self-promotion
• January 25, 2010 -- Personal reflection: Tufte’s messing with my head
• May 3, 2010 -- Note to self: Real world journo-coding lessons

One man practicing this “one-man band” concept is Paul Monies, database editor of The Oklahoman. He brings the data to stories across the paper, draws attention to data issues through his blog Data Watch and contributes to the open data movement in Oklahoma outside of the journalism world, and throughout all this, remains conscious of how data advocacy impacts his journalistic objectivity. Note: I interviewed Monies at the end of February, so the information is accurate as of that time.

This profile of Monies is a part of my continuing series I’m calling “Data Delvers,” where I pass on summaries, quotes and audio clips from conversations with journalists using technology to find, analyze and convey data-driven stories and/or projects to the modern audience.

Entering the CAR world

Monies has spent time in his career as a copy editor and business reporter. He fell into CAR while in graduate school at the University of Missouri, and interned at The Oklahoman with database editor Griff Palmer, who is now at the New York Times.

He enjoyed the “puzzle” aspect of copy editing, his role at the College Station Eagle, which he entered after he completed undergraduate work at Austin State University, where he majored in communications. He was attracted by the need for attention to detail and the visual challenges of figuring out where different pieces of the paper would go on a page.

“I was still pretty young. I missed my friends, and having the weekends free, and I missed writing,” he said. “As a copy editor, I had that attention to detail and liked laying out the page, and thought it was a giant kind of puzzle, but I wanted to get back into writing and reporting.”

He finds his aptitude for visual journalism skills, as well as an affinity for attention to detail, to be beneficial in data journalism work. His visual aptitude serves him well as he does more and more with data visualization.

He left copy editing to go to grad school because he missed writing, and was looking for a more flexible schedule.

Advocating for open data

Monies attends various community meetings regarding the open data movement in Oklahoma, and writes about these issues in his blog Data Watch, hosted on The Oklahoman’s Web site. He said he’s aware that he must retain his objectivity as a journalist, but also this is an issue that he concerns him. At the same time, data-based journalists are some of the people most actively utilizing open records laws, and analyzing public information, so he also benefits from the progress that has been made. In the past, the Oklahoman and other papers would take action by publishing stories on how hard it was to get access to certain information that should be public. Monies felt himself drawn to go a step beyond that.

“I shied away at first from advocating anything to do with open records, or data, just because I thought, “Well, it’s maybe not my place as a journalist to do that.” But as I got along and started getting more into blogging, and seeing what else is out there, there’s really no one else that can sit up, in our positions who use that data on a regular basis, and do that kind of advocacy.”

He got permission from his bosses to “step out gingerly” and take a more active role on open data issues, especially as they related to public records.

The growing popularity of visualizations

As database work has shifted to include more presenting of information to news consumers, Monies said he has been eager to jump on board.

“I like seeing that side of data, too, and presenting data in different ways. A standard table gets pretty boring after a while,” he said.

Monies said he liked that this work brings him back to his design roots. He’s especially intrigued by tools that make it simple to create a visual explanation of data quickly — and he uses Many Eyes and Tableau Desktop.

He’s interested in moving more into data-driven applications, and hopes to continue to grow what the paper is doing in this area. He and some colleagues have been looking into Python and Django, and playing with a development server. But for now, Monies is using Caspio to post data online. As other reporters have said, it’s not because it’s his favorite option, but it works when there’s a small data team.

“It’s really easy to get into,” he said. “And if you just wanted to put a quick, searchable table up there, we’d use that. I can’t say that’s our long-term goal, but to me, it’s more of a stop gap and a way that we can reach to the next level, in terms of some of the more robust applications.”

Following in the footsteps of other data reporters

Monies’ post as database editor is not new to the Oklahoman. “I’m standing on the shoulder of some giants, and I’m really fortunate to do that,” said Monies.

He worked under Griff Palmer as an intern, who started the data program at the paper. After he left for the San Jose Mercury News, he was followed by John Perry, who is now at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and he was followed by Ryan McNeil, now at the Dallas Morning News. That means some records requests to public agencies have been standing for years . This both makes it easier to get information, but also brings up questions of whether this information is still needed, or the requests are taking up extra time, energy and physical space. Either way, Monies said the benefits of a data legacy are great, although there is still plenty of work to be done.

Data work is one of many demands on reporters’ time

Monies also works with fellow reporters on newsroom training, helping them to improve data and research skills to better integrate data into their work. Monies offers classes, and a local professor comes in to assist as well. But data is one of many skills reporters are being urged to learn, and the first priority for newsrooms is filling the paper and getting stories filed. So, often, the reporters just don’t have the time. Monies gets it, because he spent five years as a business reporter at The Oklahoman.

“I don’t let that hurt my feelings, because I was a business reporter for five years here, and so I understand the concerns with daily deadlines and weekly deadlines that everyone else has,” he said. “It was a struggle then to sit down and collect your thoughts on something new.”

Extended transcript

Read on for more of Monies’ experiences with data journalism, including the growth of Web development at The Oklahoman.

I’m curious to hear more about your experience with local data in Oklahoma.  How active have you been in pushing for it? Have you found a lot of kindred spirits?

I have found a few kindred spirits.  I started the blog about two years ago. We started a little data site that has some of the databases that we’ve used in our reporting for recent stories in the weekend edition, and in other places.  We started the blog as a part of that.  I shied away at first from advocating anything to do with open records, or data, just because I thought, “Well, it’s maybe not my place as a journalist to do that.”  But as I got along and started getting more into blogging, and seeing what else is out there, there’s really no one else that can sit up, in our positions who use that data on a regular basis, and do that kind of advocacy.  So, I got permission from my bosses here to step out gingerly and make a case sometimes, especially on open records.

I shy away from outwardly attacking politicians or agency officials, or anybody like that. I try and keep it polite.  But that was one of the things that I was concerned about when I first started with this advocacy side of it.  But it’s another outlet for us beyond running a typical story in the paper saying, “Woe is us, we can’t get access to these records,.”  For the public, I think it doesn’t really resonate a lot of times with them.  To me, as an industry, we don’t always make the best case for getting access to those records. So, I thought the blog would just be another avenue for presenting that information rather than a formal, dry story that we run every Sunshine Week for the last how many years.

As far as data in Oklahoma, my predecessors in this position have built a lot of groundwork with a lot of agencies.  So, we have standing open records requests.  I’ve got to credit people like John Perry and Griff Palmer. Griff Palmer, now at the New York Times, started the program here in Oklahoma, and then went off to San Jose, and now he’s in New York.  John Perry took over after Griff, as database editor here in Oklahoma, and worked here for a number of years, and then worked at the Center for Public Integrity, and of course now in Atlanta.  And then, Ryan McNeil was my immediate predecessor, who is now at the Dallas Morning News, and before that, he was at the Sun Sentinel.  I’m standing on the shoulder of some giants and I’m really fortunate to do that.

They’ve left behind standing requests for data that we still use to this day.  We still collect state financial data, and state payroll data, from a record that Griff Palmer first requested fifteen years ago, and we’ve just kept up.  We still have all that data.  Sometimes, it’s a question of, “Well, how far back should we keep it?”  Obviously, we maintain it monthly now, but that comes to be a question when you start talking about our tech folks saying, “Well, this server’s going to be done with, and we’re storing a lot of data on it.  What do you want to do with it?”  At that point, you have to make a decision . What are the benefits of keeping payroll data from 1995?  Data we don’t look at on a regular basis at all, but you don’t know if you might need it someday. That’s one of the questions that we’ve faced. I think we, here in Oklahoma, are moving slowly but surely toward opening up data in aggregate There are some stumbling blocks down at the legislature that happen almost every year.  Our session, we’re right in the middle of it right now, and there’s some buildup that would’ve opened up more data, but ran into some roadblocks on privacy issues and identity theft issues, which has been a kind of common complaint that lawmakers say they get from their constituents, although we try and make the case that we’re not going after Social Security numbers, or any super private information that we could use or misuse. We’re looking for aggregate information that agencies already have stuck in some database somewhere. Can they open that up and give it to people on a regular basis?

In the last year or two, we’ve gotten a pretty good local tech community here in Oklahoma City, and there’s a little pocket in Tulsa, too.  It’s people who are not journalists but interested in opening up data and studying open source languages like Python, Ruby and that kind of thing.  So, I’ve gone a couple times to their events.  It’s kind of funny being the only journalist in the room at some of those things and to see how other professions are approaching some of these data issues as well – it’s an interesting mix of folks.  Hopefully, that kind of community can grow, and maybe at some point, help advocate for data from local government.  We have a couple of lawmakers that are very well in tune.  The buzzword is “Government 2.0” right now.  They’re pushing for processes at the state government level, and we’ve got some good city folks here in Oklahoma City that want to do the same thing, but everyone’s running into the same issues right now with personnel and money and time.  Of course, that’s a common complaint in newsrooms across the country, and not just about government agencies.

Because you’re coming after some CAR giants, was a data culture already integrated into the newsroom when you got there?  How do you find you fit in the culture?

They were somewhat integrated, but like any newsroom, you’ve got reporters that specialize in different stuff, and some are not interested at all in data, some are fantastic writers but less concerned about the nuts and bolts of the statistical side of things.  One of my jobs, too, and my predecessors had the same role, is to help out in newsroom training, show folks basic spreadsheet skills, help them out with the latest things online, going beyond the standard Google search, really helping them find a mix of stuff on deadline, whether people or facts or whatever. We have a local professor who comes in once a week and helps out on the training things, too.  We have a decent amount of training available.  Now, of course, like any other place (I’ve worked at a couple of other newspapers, too) it’s hard for reporters to break off to get a concentrated period of time to do something that’s training.

It’s always a battle.  And it’s not necessarily from the reporter’s side that they want to do it, but their editor is over them, and wants to see a story every day, and the deadline needs to be hit.  They’re there to keep a seat filled in the newsroom while they’re gathering news, and that’s not always helpful, when you’re trying to sit down and explain the intricacies of  Access or Excel or statistical analysis.  There’s pretty good support for that, it’s just that people don’t have the time or interest sometimes to attend every event that you put on.  I don’t let that hurt my feelings, because I was a business reporter for five years here, and so I understand the concerns with daily deadlines and weekly deadlines that everyone else has. It was a struggle then to sit down and collect your thoughts on something new.

Can you take me through how your career path and how you got interested in computer-assisted reporting?

I’m 34 years old, I worked at my high school newspaper when I went to high school in Jacksonville, Texas in east Texas, but I was actually born in Scotland, but moved over to Texas with my mom and stepdad and sister in 1987. I took middle school and high school in Texas and then went off to college and worked for the college newspaper.  I bounced around between a couple of colleges early in my undergrad career.  I finally ended up as a student at Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and graduated from there in 1998, with a degree in communication and a minor in English. Then I worked for almost at the College Station Eagle in College Station, Texas where Texas A&M is.  I was actually a copy editor and page designer at that paper.  I enjoyed it, but didn’t like the hours as a copy editor.  I was still pretty young.  I missed my friends, and having the weekends free, and I missed writing, too.  As a copy editor, I had that attention to detail and liked laying out the page, and thought it was a giant kind of puzzle, but I wanted to get back into writing and reporting.  I applied to grad school,  and got into Missouri.

I attended Missouri from 1999 to 2001.  I took the standard classes on the news and print side. But it wasn’t until my first internship there in the fall of 1999, where I went on a whim and wasn’t really prepared, to figure out exactly what I wanted to do the next summer.  That’s one of my regrets, that I wasn’t as focused on internships at that point as I think college students are today.  I sat down with Griff Palmer at that time, who had been sent up by the Oklahoman to recruit interns for that next summer.  He mentioned at that time, while I’m at Missouri, they had an excellent computer-assisted reporting program at NICAR there, he said, “You should check out what they’re doing.” So, when it came time to register for classes in the spring, I registered for a computer-assisted reporting class.  Meanwhile, I’d sent off several applications for internships that following summer.  The Oklahoman called me back, and said, “Would you like to come be an intern?” and I said, “I would love to, but could I also maybe work with Griff on some data stuff?”  At that point, interns were rotating around the newsroom at the Oklahoman.

I spent three or four weeks on the copy desk, so I had some experience with that.  I spent three or four weeks doing data work with Griff Palmer, and got my very first computer-assisted reporting story done that summer.   I looked into the Coast Guard’s voting accident database, and did a little quick story on jet ski accidents in the Oklahoma lakes.  That came out in a July weekend edition that summer, and I was pretty excited about that, and pretty proud of that project, and Griff helped me out with a lot of that.  We also did an intern project that summer as a whole intern group, there’s probably about 15 or 20 of us total, and we did a project on open records.  We did an audit of every county in the state of four or five different types of open records.  It was us, and the Tulsa World that did the project that summer.  That was my entry into computer-assisted reporting, and once I went back to Missouri, I refocused and decided that was my career path.  I took more classes there, and then went off and did the Washington program for my last semester at Missouri.  My thesis was about how credit is assigned in computer-assisted reporting stories.

I did a survey of NICAR journalists about how they felt, if they were getting credit for their work that they were helping other reporters with.  It’s probably less of an issue now, but at that point it was a pretty big issue in terms of “Are you just a data jockey crunching numbers and then handing off the results to reporters who are getting the byline, and you’re only getting a credit line, where they couldn’t have done the story without your part?”  There were some varying degrees of concern with that at the time.  I haven’t seen it be much of a concern lately. I think everybody’s role has kind of morphed beyond just doing those parts.  We’ve got more database editors who are doing data analysis and writing, we’ve got more reporters who are doing writing and a little bit of data analysis.  Everybody’s fields have merged a little bit more, so I don’t know if that’s an issue anymore.  But that was definitely something I focused on in my thesis when I was a masters’ student.

What did you find in your research? Was it a big concern at that time?

You’re asking me about something I haven’t looked at for many years.  But briefly, of the 80 or 90 people who responded to the survey – and NICAR was a great benefit, and they gave me their mailing list, so I could mail out surveys, and this was before they had SurveyMonkey, so I’m dating myself, there weren’t online surveys you could fill out.  Well, maybe there were, but we weren’t using them.  I sent all these envelopes, and stuffed them, and put the stamps on them.  Basically, what I found out was that on the print side, among the people whose title at that time was database editor, there was a lot of concern about them not getting credited, and there were a couple of stories.

It was an anonymous survey, so I just followed up with people that gave me permission to follow up, but some anonymous comments were people missing out on prizes, which obviously is an integral part of a lot of journalism advancement and praise and career development.  People had missed out, they didn’t credit for a story they worked on, or a package of stories they worked on, there was some lingering bitterness over that.  But more than anything, there was just a realization that you have to fight for your byline, and fight for your credit line, because no one’s just going to hand it to you.  No one’s going to remember that you did that, unless you point it out to them.  You’re dealing with editors that are on deadline, and stuff is mislaid and forgotten about when it gets to crunch time on a project.  It’s just more of a cautionary thing, I think, from the survey, saying you just have to make sure that you’re credited, and you have to speak up for yourself.  It was an interesting thing to work on, and it gave me an idea of some of the pressures of that type of job.  Of course, I say that and did all this work in grad school, and came out in 2001.

I actually interned while I was in DC, and that last internship was with Dateline NBC.  I got a little view into the TV side of things, and thought about that as a possibility.  I basically worked in the Washington bureau of Dateline NBC when they were doing, I think, three to five shows a week, so they were really busy coordinating with the New York office, which was the main Dateline office.  But I was in charge of doing some of the data analysis for some of the stories.   I worked with a producer in New York, it was Andy Lehren, who’s now at the New York Times, at that time he was working with Dateline.  He helped me out a lot when I was working on the professional projects side of my Washington semester.  It wasn’t strictly related to my thesis but it was part of it as well.  I got a good idea of how TV news magazines handled computer-assisted reporting at that time.

I graduated from Missouri in 2001, and defended my thesis, and went off and became a cops reporter at the Waco Tribune-Herald, down in Waco, Texas, which I have no regrets about.  Coming from wanting to focus on computer-assisted reporting, there just wasn’t a whole lot of entry level computer-assisted reporting jobs at that time.  It was an interesting time in journalism.  It’s not as bad as it is now, but there weren’t a whole lot of jobs when I came out in that summer.  I went to Waco, and was a cops reporter for just over a year. I had a fantastic time doing that, I loved being out on crime scenes.  Tried to use some CAR skills while I was there, but mostly was doing regular cops reporting with a little bit of enterprise.  Looked at some jail inspections, that sort of thing.  It was a fun time to be a reporter, but it wasn’t exactly what I was focused on.

The Oklahoman called me up and said they had an opening on their business desk for a business reporter.  I told them, “It sounds interesting, but I have zero experience in business reporting.  I’ve never done it before, I’ve never really paid much attention to accounting, or anything like that, or even business while I was in college or grad school.”  But to me, I started thinking about it, and it was more of a challenge, and I thought, “Well, I’ll give it a shot, and see how I like it.”  And I really started enjoying it.  It was a lot to learn at the outset for someone who had covered mainly government and police before.  I covered some state capital and county government stuff while I was at Missouri.  But business reporting, to me, was this weird subset of reporting that I had no clue about and had to learn on the job.  Which I think, sometimes, is the best way to do it, to learn all these things, how to decipher a financial statement from a public company, strategies for getting people at companies, who don’t have to talk to you for any reason, to talk to you.   It was a little different tack than going after stories from government who are a lot of times compelled to make themselves look good, or tell you stuff under their open records act.  Business is a little different, because you’re dealing with the public relations side of that, and also a lot of small private companies didn’t have to tell you anything if they didn’t want to.  So that was more of a challenge for me.  You’ve got to say, “Well, can I do this?”  And I really started enjoying it.

I covered business for five years here at the Oklahoman.  Basically covered manufacturing, and some of the local public companies and the local economy.  So I covered unemployment and economic indicators and that kind of thing. It made it easier that I had a little bit of CAR background, so I was comfortable with numbers, and not afraid of dealing with them.  That made it easier for me to slide into the business beat, which is just so numbers driven when you’re doing a company earning story every quarter, or looking at financial statements every year.  It was something I didn’t shy away from, But then I was a little rusty in my CAR skills.  While I was there, we had two people, John Perry and Ryan McNeil, working as database editors, and so my skills got rusty, to be honest.  I was still pretty good with a spreadsheet, I could get into Access when I needed to, but when I took over as database editor, I had to give myself a quick refresher on some of the SQL skills that I hadn’t done on a regular basis for a while.  But it was like any other job, it’s just a process of managing what you can do right away, and a long-term plan.  I really need to get into this, and learn this, so that’s my goal for the next six months.

I’ve been database editor now for more than two years now, and sure, there’s still frustrations, like you deal with in every job with editors and deadlines and expectations, but I’d say I’m happy with my job 85 percent of the time.  It seems like there’s more to go after now in terms of data.  That’s been one of the things that I’m getting more into — the data visualization thing. Here, I’ve got to credit my predecessors too.  They have established that the database editor position has some pretty good tools to work with.  We’ve got Arc GIS, we’ve got SAS.  In the last year, I bought Tableau Desktop, which I think is a great little tool, just for some quick analysis. Nothing you couldn’t do already, probably, in Access or SQL Server, which we also use.  But if you want to visualize some stuff real quick, and point you in the right direction so you can run some more detailed queries later on, it’s great.

The data viz side, especially when it comes to Tableau and open source tools like Many Eyes, is great.  Tableau actually just released the free Tableau Public, which I’ve been excited to check out.  That’s all an area of passion for me right now, because I see these mashups that are on these other Web sites, doing all sorts of cool things with data and visualization, and to me, as someone who’s been a copy editor, and a business reporter, and a cops reporter, I like the visual side of things.  I liked it when I was a page designer, which I did briefly, it was less than a year, but I enjoyed it.  I like seeing that side of data, too, and presenting data in different ways.  A standard table gets pretty boring after a while.

Do you feel any pressure from management to expand into Web development? Is there an undue amount of pressure on your time?

There’s some pressure, but it’s mostly self-generated.  Our management is good. The way we do things here at the Oklahoman, we have a couple people in the newsroom that are pretty well skilled on the Web side of things.  The Web editors, our blog experts that can do WordPress and add-ons.  In the last year or two, we’ve looked more at a separate side of the news business that’s audience development, which focuses on the Web side. The newsroom is still putting out the paper, still contributing to the Web site, but we have another part of our company now that’s audience development and is focused on new Web platforms.  It’s not necessarily journalism-related, but we have this application and Web site that started out about a year and a half ago.  It started out as a directory and a calendar, and it’s now morphed into a local search engine for listings, and entertainment listings, and that kind of thing.  We’ve seen a lot of development on that from our IT folks.   And the newsroom side hasn’t really enjoyed that level of emphasis.  And I want to be diplomatic about it, because I don’t want to point fingers, I think we’re doing the right thing as a company as a whole, but I don’t think we’ve pushed very far into what the newsroom can generate in terms of Web development stuff. We’ve got some great people that do Flash animations, we’ve got some good things out of that.

But as far as data-driven applications, like you see maybe at other newspapers and other media companies, we haven’t gotten to that level yet.  But they have allowed us, meaning me and a couple other people in our newsroom, to spend some time on learning some other ways to do this stuff. We’ve got, including myself, three people who are doing some stuff on Django.  We’ve started doing that in the last year, we’ve gotten a little development server that we’re working on.  One of the Web guys in our newsroom has been working on some story walls, small projects he’s running through Django now.  My big goal is to learn a lot more about Django and Python specifically, and get some data-driven apps that we can replace Caspio with.

We’re using Caspio right now.  I know a lot of people, a lot of the purists, knock Caspio. Ryan McNeil bequeathed it to me, and now I don’t think he likes it very much.  Caspio, for all its detractors, when you’re a one- or two- or three-man operation, in a pinch, works really well.  It’s really easy to get into.  And if you just wanted to put a quick, searchable table up there, we’d use that.  I can’t say that’s our long-term goal, but to me, it’s more of a stop gap and a way that we can reach to the next level, in terms of some of the more robust applications.  But we’re hoping to move to Django.

Related posts you might enjoy:

• March 25, 2010 -- Self-teaching data and programming skills
• March 18, 2010 -- My next move: LA Times!
• March 8, 2010 -- Data Delver: Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica
• February 28, 2010 -- Django app #2: Conquering forms and Google Maps API
• February 20, 2010 -- Data Delver: Chase Davis, California Watch
• February 20, 2010 -- Data Delver: MaryJo Webster, Pioneer Press

I didn’t retweet it for a few hours, because, for once, an opinion didn’t jump into my mind.  If you were in my classes at Medill, watching me wince in pain every time we stopped short of delving as deep as we needed to, complaining about the pervading fear of code in journalism, if you knew me, you’d think I would jump up and down, and say, “Now, why couldn’t I have that?  It would have been awesome!”  People are saying it helps people who aren’t coders become coders.  While some pointed out that Medill had this first, our program was for programmers to become journalists.  And how does that serve liberal arts majors who want to code for journalism?  Why isn’t it listed as a course option?  Wouldn’t this Columbia program make life so much easier?

Let’s put my biases out front: I’m a recent Medill grad.  I am a programmer-journalist.  I do not hold an interactive concentration from Medill.  I took no programming classes within Medill.  I did not participate in the programmer to journalist program. I didn’t get that tuition-free deal. Medill had this first, but didn’t have a curriculum for turning liberal arts majors into journo-coders.  And, you know what?  I don’t think they should.  You get something from pushing through it, pursuing your own interests, learning how to learn.

Sorry, I’m just not on board with a joint-degree program.  Take a few coding classes, but that can be done by cross-registering outside your department at many schools.  But understand that any coding you’re taught may be replaced by a new language years, weeks or days later.  We shouldn’t be taking too many classes in coding, but learning how to learn quickly from the Internet.  If, let’s say, you need a JQuery library to perform a certain task, know how to adapt tutorials, don’t think, “Now, this wasn’t in that degree I got, what do I do?”

As Poynter’s Dave Stanton pointed out, there’s a lack of statistics in this curriculum.  This is absolutely essential for people who will be concentrating in data mining, or data-driven app creation.  Perhaps this is easily remedied.  But it signals to me that there are probably similar holes elsewhere in the curriculum, holes I don’t understand as well.  Hopefully, these will be patched in future iterations.  I do have some concerns about the first class to go through this program, though.  But we must change curricula, or die.  And there will be some successes, and improvements to be made, with each new attempt.  Kudos to Columbia on taking a chance!

I also hope there’s a way to pick a specialization within the program.  This is a tall order to complete in a year, and you may excel at data analysis, or visualization, or automating news aggregation, or something else.  But they require a distinct set of skills.  I would approach this as I would a general journalism curriculum.  Get familiar with all the different options, figure out what you love, and get really good at it.

And perhaps the biggest problem of all is the misconception that by putting computer science and journalism classes next to each other, even with integration, we’ve created a recipe for programmer-journalists.  You don’t need to struggle to figure out what to learn, we can do it for you.  I can’t help but feel that this encourages complacency.  If I just listen to my advisor, and follow the steps laid out for me, I can do it.  But you must never stop learning.  What do you do when the syllabus runs out?  It’s essential to learn to learn what you need to know, and then do it.  If students don’t search beyond the curriculum, we may stop moving forward.  The world is moving too fast to create a finite cs roadmap at this point.

There’s something to sitting down and hacking something out.  Part of the beauty of coding is that anyone can do it, follow the steps, learn the language, and you WILL get it.  This program may give students a push, but it’s by no means essential.

So, sure, let’s encourage journos to take cs classes, talk to cs professors.  But gaining a masters in both fields, in little more than a year?  It’s a good option, but far from the only one.  It is only the beginning.  If you go to another school, you could make your own program, take classes in both departments.  This is formalizing what some of us are already doing.  If you enter this program, remember to push your faculty resources even further, and don’t believe it’s a panacea, cure-all, complete road map to what we need done.  This is the first rung up the ladder. There are other ways to climb, and even once you get to the first rung, in the end, it’s up to you to go ever higher.

Related posts you might enjoy:

• September 16, 2010 -- Journ curricula’s need for transition isn’t unique
• November 24, 2009 -- A letter to journo-programmers: Teach me, inspire me
• May 3, 2010 -- Note to self: Real world journo-coding lessons
• March 29, 2010 -- Using Javascript for interactive Google charts
• March 28, 2010 -- Data Delver: Mark Schaver, Louisville Courier
• March 25, 2010 -- Self-teaching data and programming skills