A planning committee is being formed for the 2015 Region 2, which will be held March 27 and 28 at the University of Maryland at College Park. The 2014 regional conference, hosted by Georgetown University’s SPJ chapter, and held March 28-29 at the new quarters of the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies in downtown Washington near Chinatown. Chapter adviser and co-chair was Amy Kovac-Ashley, an assistant dean at Georgetown University’s Master of Professional Studies Program.
Here’s a recap of a few of the March 29 sessions:
‘A Date with Data’
“Data is a state of mind,” said Derek Willis. “Think of data as people, as a source you have to find, interview, get background on -– like a person or a document.”
He works at The New York Times as part of The Upshot, a new site emphasizing data-driven journalism. He teaches data reporting for the Georgetown master’s in journalism program.
His session was titled “A Date With Data.”
Too few journalists are interested in data, Willis said, or perhaps, he suggested, they are intimidated by data. Too many journalists say they “don’t need to do math … don’t need to think about numbers. It’s an embarrassment on our profession,” he said. “Try to go five minutes without doing some math — there’s math in counting change.”
He advised reporters to think of a story idea as questions. “Be more intentional — because questions have answers,” he explained. “Instead of saying, ‘I want to do a story about bridges,’ rephrase it: ‘I want to find out what percentage of bridges are unsafe.’
“A question gets you into the data state of mind!”
Journalists are not “lacking for competition,” he pointed out. “If we want to set ourselves apart, err on the side of less anecdote and more on facts, data.”
According to Willis, there’s an old joke that when news reporters say these three things happened, it’s a trend. “That’s not a trend. That’s not how trends work,” said Willis.
Instead, look at data to see a trend, he advised.
“We’re producing more data than ever. It’s increasing exponentially,” he said. “If you don’t want to understand data, you’re cutting yourself out of stories. Not wanting to understand data is like saying, ‘I want to be a journalist, but I don’t like to take notes’!”
A reporter should approach new data, Willis said, like he or she would approach a blind date: Understand as much as you can about the data before you meet. Have some skepticism about your data. Size up your data, when you meet.
He led the session’s attendees through an exercise in creating a spreadsheet of data using a recent arrest record available from the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department. He showed ways to filter the data and create small subsets of information on those arrested — for example, by age, by gender, by crime, by address (of the arrestee, not the crime). He used an Excel spreadsheet for the demonstration, saying that Excel is a great place to start but said that as a reporter gets deeper into mining data for stories, some kind of database manager might be more helpful. Or, he said, a reporter can create software to mine the data — it’s not that hard.
Reporters should “think data” whenever they see forms that various agencies ask people to fill out. “You should think, ‘That’s a database,” Willis said. “Someone is filling out forms and someone is entering it. The form is the way they (government agencies) interact with most citizens.”
He said reporters also “should build an inventory” of blank forms, because “it helps you understand what databases they have.”
Focusing on data “becomes addictive,” Willis said. “(It) gets you exclusive stories.”
By Julie Asher
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Making news organizations as accountable as those they cover
Erik Wemple, media critic for The Washington Post, was critical of how few news organizations are as accountable as they expect their sources to be when they are the focus of a story.
They hunker down and let their PR machine spin, he said in addressing the crowd at the 2014 regional’s Mark of Excellence Awards Lunch.
At newspapers like The Washington Post, editors send memos to reporters and editors congratulating them on how great this or that story was, how many page views the paper is getting, what traffic the news site is getting, and “how many awards we’ve won,” he said.
But when it comes to answering a reporter’s questions about their own operation, news organizations “have become masters at deflection,” Wemple said. News organizations are always digging deeply into political campaigns, nonprofits and corporations for a story, but what happens when news organizations themselves are the subject of a story?
They have people thinking about how they are going to deflect a reporter’s questions, he said.
As an example he talked about The New York Times’ efforts to get someone from CNN to answer pretty widespread criticism that the cable outlet had over-covered the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 last spring. The story was given airtime 24/7 for days, and “a lot of people had a problem with it, thought it was just terrible” to have practically nonstop coverage, said Wemple.
“So The New York Times thought they would talk to CNN about the ‘over-coverage,’ and got someone on the phone at CNN, who said: ‘You can’t use my name but …’ And here’s his quote. ‘It’s a tremendous story that’s in our wheelhouse.’”
That was the whole quote and it said nothing.
A recent story Wemple was working on had to do with a new survey that showed what news organizations spend on news gathering, and CNN was at the top. Wemple called for comment and what he got was this quote “on background”: “CNN continues to invest heavily in news gathering around the world.”
Wemple recalled that he told the CNN spokesperson — whose name he was told he couldn’t use — that he “wanted to get deeper than a press release.” The person told him, “Just a minute” and went off to consult with someone — Wemple said he could hear a conversation going on in the background. The person came back to the phone and told Wemple: “I’ve been instructed to tell you that our press releases speak for themselves.”
“As journalists we love to make people accountable, to give up information … but when people want to know our information, generous aren’t we?” Wemple asked.
“At news organizations, if we want to hold people accountable, we have to be accountable as well,” he said.
“When a news organization gets in trouble, there’s (usually) a two-sentence statement and a lot of ass covering, not a lot of answers.”
In this news culture “we act like the people we cover,” Wemple said. “We hunker down and use state-of-the-art PR deflection. If it (this tactic) has not hindered our ability now to cover stories, it will.”
He told the audience, made up mostly of journalism students, that once they start working in journalism, if their reporting is ever called into question and “you are not allowed (by your media company) to speak to the press, tell your superiors: ‘If you don’t defend my journalism, I’m going to!’”
By Julie Asher
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Recalling their journalism days, PIOs tell the inside story
Two government public information officers who used to be journalists shared their thoughts about both sides of the reporter-source relationship during a March 29 session.
David Nitkin, formerly of The Baltimore Sun, now works for Howard County (Md.) government. Elise Armacost, also formerly of The Sun, is a spokeswoman for Baltimore County Police, Fire and Emergency Management.
Nitkin and Armacost previously experienced the journalism-public relations tension firsthand. Years ago, Nitkin covered Baltimore County government when Armacost was the communications director for C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, the county executive at the time.
“My goal was to be respected and feared,” Nitkin said of his reporting days, when he turned to a PIO as a last resort.
Now, as a former journalist fielding press inquiries, he understands the angles reporters pursue and what information they need, he said.
Some PIOs grumble that reporters are only trying to sell papers, Armacost said, but journalists actually want to tell good stories.
Nitkin suggested that reporters do more to cultivate sources, such as himself, and use the Maryland Public Information Act to go after records that might offer good story ideas.
Armacost urged reporters to distinguish between “confirmed,” “unconfirmed” and “preliminary” reports and to give officials time to gather details.
The best gift a reporter could give a public information officer, she said, is to be open minded and realize when a story turns out to be different than expected.
By Andy Schotz, Region 2 Director