USA Today wins 3 national prizes with CAR; how can you get started?
USA Today won first place in the 2009 Philip Meyer Journalism Award contest for its story, “The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America’s Schools.” The award from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) recognizes the best use of social science methods in journalism. It also won the Oakes Award for Environmental Journalism and the Grantham Prize for environmental reporting.
Reporters Blake Morrison and Brad Heath looked at the levels of air pollution near schools across the country and put them into a searchable online database
They write: “Using the government’s most up-to-date model for tracking toxic chemicals, USA TODAY spent eight months examining the impact of industrial pollution on the air outside schools across the nation. The model is a computer simulation that predicts the path of toxic chemicals released by thousands of companies.”
Today’s Tip: With computer-assisted reporting, you can pick up where the data stops.
Brad’s advice: find interesting stories, and then learn the skills you need to get them done. To figure out what you need, ask sources what’s missing from the report and see if the data can be tabulated to provide the answer.
Brad Heath
For instance, Brad says he learned mapping and GIS (Geographic Information System) analysis, as well as basic Web programming, when he needed to gather data for specific stories. He also found help from the NICAR listserv, which is a e-mail list set up by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. NICAR is a program of IRE, which offers boot camps in CAR and will hold its annual CAR conference in Phoenix from March 11-14.
Brad says his interest in CAR started 10 years ago during an internship in upstate New York.
“I was working on a project about nursing-home care and needed to analyze federal inspection reports – and the only way to do that was with a database,” Brad says in an e-mail. “My first attempts were pretty feeble (I ended up building my own database with QBasic). One of the editors there very helpfully got me started with a proper database program (Microsoft Access), and it sort of snowballed from there.”
