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.

A picture worth a two-parter – and a prize

A photo in The Seattle Times of landslides led its reporters Hal Bernton and Justin Mayo to look behind what caused the landslides – and the resulting $57 million in damage from them and the concomitant floods -- earning them and photographer Steve Ringman the James V. Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism.

Today’s Tip: Photographs and photojournalists often can offer great tips worth additional investigation. If something looks suspicious, check it out.

Their two-part series, which published in July 2008, looked at the role Weyerhaeuser played in the December 2007 landslides. As The Times wrote in announcing the award on Sept. 8:

Using software to map the impacts of clear-cutting by the timber company Weyerhaeuser, they found that such massive removal of trees in one harvest region accounted for one-third of landslides there.

The project "stood out for its ambition, its persistence and its compelling conclusions," one judge wrote. "The combination of computer-assisted reporting and strong interviews offered a template that should be used for journalists covering timber controversies and other land-use debates across the West."

The Times explains how it did the research comparing clear-cut areas to landslide sites, which undergirded the series and resulted in a very cool interactive map.