Pulitzer Prize winner: listen to your community and learn to ‘interview’ data
Daniel Gilbert
- The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service carries this medal, which was won in 2010 by Daniel Gilbert of the 33,000-circulation Bristol Herald Courier in Virginia.
Daniel Gilbert of the Bristol Herald Courier in Virginia won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service this week for an eight-part series looking at the mismanagement of natural-gas royalties owed to landowners in southwest Virginia. Daniel says the biggest takeaway from the series is that newspapers have a responsibility to do the hard stuff.
“We have to find out what matters to people in the community. You have to listen to what people are frustrated or angry about,” he says. “Newspapers can do that. Other people won’t.”
By listening to people, he got the tip that led him to request the data that underpinned the series.
Today’s Tip: Learn how to “interview” data, Daniel says.
“It was kind of like opening a door and walking into a room that I didn’t know existed,” says Daniel, 28, who graduated from the University of Chicago in 2005 with a B.A. in international studies. While he speaks both French and Spanish and had freelanced in the Southwest, Mexico and Washington, D.C., computer-assisted reporting (CAR) was a new language. He got permission from his bosses at the Bristol Herald Courier, which he joined as a staff writer in December 2007, to take a weeklong CAR boot camp offered by Investigative Reporters and Editors at the University of Missouri.
The CAR training taught him how to use SQL (Structured Query Language) to ask questions of Microsoft Access databases. He says interviewing the data requires moving away from thinking of the numbers as just data entry and asking them a question. His question: Are energy corporations paying into the escrow accounts what they are required to pay for the benefit of the landowners?
He checked the payments against the amount of gas being extracted and sent those spreadsheets to sources. “I said, ‘This looks like a problem to me. Can you explain it?’” he says. “They had every opportunity to say you screwed up.”
The series resulted in the energy companies’ deposit of an additional $1.1 million into the escrow account for landowners - boosting it to more than $25 million – as well as legislation aimed at ending ownership disputes over the natural gas so that the escrowed funds can get to landowners. Daniel says he was gratified to see legislative and other changes result from the series, but he’s not done yet.
“That money belongs to people,” he says.
“You don’t have to work for large papers like The New York Times to do good Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism,” Daniel says. The 33,000-circulation Bristol Herald Courier has seven reporters.
For more information about learning to use CAR, see this earlier blog post about Daniel’s win.
