Chapter 9 - Finding and Using Data

Now it’s time to turn your attention to the numbers contained in the documents you have obtained. Through examples of several important stories that are based on numbers, you will learn how to use data in a story. You will acquire the skills to find data on the Internet as well as the knowledge to navigate government bureaucracies and negotiate with them for data. Finally, you will gain an understanding of what to do with the data you acquire — how to use data accurately to quantify an issue for your readers.

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Exercises

Use advanced searching techniques to find data

  1. Go online to socialexplorer.com and search the U.S. Census database for data for three counties in your state. Select the categories “Median Household Income” and “Median Household Rent.” How do the three counties compare? If people should be paying no more than half their household income for rent, how economically healthy are the residents in each county? Copy the charts that Social Explorer has made for you and paste them into a spreadsheet.
  2. Go to www.securityoncampus.org, the site for statistics on campus crimes compiled as required by the Jeanne Clery Act federal legislation. Plug in your school’s name and find and record the crime statistics for your campus for murders, sexual offenses, and burglaries. Then do the same for three other universities of varying sizes. Take each of the figures and divide them by the number of students enrolled on the campus to find per-capita information. Which is the most dangerous according to the per-capita findings. Is it a different ranking from the aggregate numbers? Are the larger schools more or less safe than the smaller ones?
  3. Using Google’s advanced search functions, search in your university’s domain for an Excel spreadsheet. Download it to you computer and see if you can do the following calculations using the data:
    1. An aggregate amount
    2. A median value
    3. A mode
    4. A percent change
    5. A highest or lowest amount

Big Story Steps

Finding the data for your story

Go through all the interview notes collected so far and all the reports and documentation that you have found. What relevant data have you found or have people alluded to? This is the time to figure out how you might be able to quantify your problem.

  1. Is there a way to use numbers or other data to demonstrate inequity?
  2. Can you show an increasing or decreasing trend?
  3. Is it relevant to show a median or average value and compare it with another locality or a larger area — comparing local numbers to state or national figures, for example?
  4. Can you rank your data to show the best- or worst-case examples?
  5. Can you do a comparison with a previous time period — five years ago, for example — and show the percent change for better or worse?