Engage readers with interactive charts, graphics

BBC News reporter Steve Schifferes’ story about bailout spending offers interactive graphics and words to explain how the United States and the United Kingdom have spent the most.

New calculations by the BBC, based on IMF data given to G20 finance ministers, shows these countries have spent a total of $10 trillion (£6tn).
The UK and US spent the most, with the UK spending far more, 94% of its GDP compared to 25% in the US.
That equates to £30,000 per person in the UK and $10,000 in the US.

Seven interactive slides help tell the story before readers even get to the article.

Today’s Tip: Use interactive tools to illustrate your story.

Graphics help reach readers and viewers who won’t get to the end of your story. Yet for those who do, you'll want to make sure your story isn’t just a rehash of the visual data.

For more information on ways to use graphics, read this 2001 article by Joanne Miller of the Charlotte Observer. She details how the paper created its graphics packages following 9/11.

Take data to the ground level

Jonathan Karl of ABC News and Thomas Frank of USA Today tracked how the federal government has spent money on small airports that see few passengers.

Jonathan’s segment looks at stimulus funding used for commercial airports that provide fewer than five flights a day. His story singles out the Ouzinkie Airport in Alaska, which he says “hit the stimulus jackpot with $15 million. That’s $100,000 for each of the town’s 150 residents -- even though there’s another airport just 30 minutes away.”

Thomas’ article focuses on the Airport Improvement Program, which offers federal funding to general aviation airports that serve only private planes. He notes in his story that the money used on the commercial airports comes from taxes on all airplane-ticket sales.

The taxes can add up to 15% to the cost of a flight — or about $29 to a $200 round-trip ticket.
Federal lawmakers have used some of the money to build and maintain the world's most expansive and expensive network of airports — 2,834 of them nationwide — with no scheduled passenger flights. Known as general-aviation airports, they operate separately from the 139 well-known commercial airports that handle almost all passenger flights.
In the first full accounting of the 28-year-old Airport Improvement Program, USA TODAY found that Congress has directed $15 billion to general-aviation airports, which typically are tucked on country roads and industrial byways.

Today’s Tip: Take data to the ground level.

By gathering details and seeing the airports in action, the reporters were able to put together stories showing how the money was misspent.

The USAToday story includes an interactive map that allows viewers to click on symbols for each individual U.S. airport and see how much air traffic and federal money it has received.

If you’d like to look at stimulus funding in your area, check out this piece from W.J. Hennigan to help you track stimulus spending. You can also review the archived live blog of the Reynolds Center’s Sept. 21 workshop in Dallas with New York Times reporter Ron Nixon on the topic. Nixon will also be teaching how to track stimulus funds at a free Reynolds Center workshop in New Orleans on Nov. 9. For more information or to register, please click here. To participate in the live blog of that workshop, go to www.BusinessJournalism.org on Nov. 9.

Bringing data to life

Rico Gagliano of American Public Media’s “Marketplace Money” used a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland to create a segment questioning how two seemingly similar areas could have such dramatically different foreclosure rates.

North Collinwood's rate in 2007? Almost 21 percent. Braddock's? 5 percent. Both places should have been equally hit by foreclosures, but the Ohio community got hit harder.

Today’s Tip: Use additional sources to bring data from agencies such as the Federal Reserve alive.

Rico adds the human element by driving us around a neighborhood with him to see what the data means. He also focused the segment by citing only the foreclosure rates, although the Federal Reserve report offers lots of numbers.

Also of note, the same show aired a segment illustrating the ripple effect of reduced spending by Cleveland consumers. Dan Bobkoff shows how the loss of the father's job affected one family’s spending at individual businesses. The lesson: follow the money.

"Lies, damned lies and statistics"

Dennis Cauchon of USA Today writes that women will soon outnumber men in the work force. He uses statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for his story, but more importantly, he tells readers what the numbers don’t say:

The change reflects the growing importance of women as wage earners, but it doesn't show full equality, [Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research,] says. On average, women work fewer hours than men, hold more part-time jobs and earn 77% of what men make, she says. Men also still dominate higher-paying executive ranks.

Today's Tip: Don’t mislead readers by omitting what the numbers don’t show.

The story easily could have focused just on women’s gains in the workplace, which is how the Chicago CBS station ran its story. Not until the last line of the CBS piece does it point out: “Even outnumbering men, a woman, on average, will still make 20 percent less than the guy next to her.”

As Mark Twain said in his autobiography, quoting a remark attributed to 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”