Numbers are the language of the world. Ruby interviews Steve Doig, experienced data journalist and current ASU professor, on how working with data can be a business journalist’s superpower. Steve discusses how understanding data tools for smaller stories can prepare you for bigger stories that happen near you or in your beat.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Ruby Arora: Welcome to “We Mean Business.” I’m your host, Ruby Arora. This podcast is about something that affects all of us: business. Our culture and society are molded around business and what business leaders want. It impacts our daily lives more than we know. Here at the Reynolds Center we focus on business journalism, and we’re here acting as the liaison connecting business with journalism, allowing journalists to cover business better.
So today, we have a guest star, Steve Doig, who is also an ASU professor, currently one of my own. Could you give us a brief description of your experience, your background, and how you found yourself at ASU?
Steve Doig: Certainly, I was a reporter in Florida for, I guess about 23 years, most of that time with the Miami Herald down, way down in South Florida. While I was there, I learned that you needed, you kind of needed, a superpower to be able to compete in a place like the Herald, where it was surrounded by reporters who would go on to win Pulitzers and get hired by the New York Times and The Washington Post and a variety of other great news organizations. So turned out that the superpower that I developed was being able to work with with numbers, and I used that superpower to do a variety of important stories. The biggest was after Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1994. I was part of a team that looked at the, basically the aftermath of it, we tried to kind of answer the question of “what went wrong?” The fact that there were so many homes destroyed in a place that supposedly had very strong building codes. My part of it was doing an analysis of the damage patterns, and sort of pointing out that the variable that predicted how bad the damage would be actually was the year the home was built, and basically, the newer the home, the more likely it would be destroyed, which was sort of the smoking gun of that investigation.
So anyway, I did a variety of these kinds of really big data stories, and in 1996, Arizona State had gotten a a significant grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to hire somebody to teach journalists and journalism students the, then brand new idea of using data analysis for reporting, and have been there ever since.
Arora: You’re a very successful, reputable, celebrated reporter. You’ve won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, IRE award, Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the George Polk Award, among many others. Boy that’s a mouthful. How did you find yourself to be the recipient of so many awards? And how can other journalists set themselves up for the same success?
Doig: Well, lots of it is, I guess, location and timing and so on. It’s not something you can necessarily plan to do. I mean, I certainly didn’t say the beginning of my career, “got to make sure to live in a high hurricane area.” Thing is here either good luck or bad luck or whatever. But, but there is a famous saying. I think it was Louis Pasteur, the microbiologist, that said “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And in my case, I had started doing these kind of data stories at the Herald, analyzing election results. And I once did an analysis of the property tax roll that helped show that that basically rich people were getting a big tax break because their homes were being undervalued for the property tax. And I had been doing smaller data stories and basically learning the power of what it was I was doing. So when the big story came along, Hurricane Andrew, I’d already had enough familiarity with important data like the property tax roll, which I wound up using to get information, for instance, on the year of construction of all the homes that we were going to examine.
I guess my best advice for young reporters is do good work with whatever beat that you have, because you never know when your particular beat is going to come out and be part of the biggest story of the year or of your lifetime.
Arora: How does data journalism affect business journalism, and how is it used?
Doig: So business is a huge data story, and I among the courses that I developed for the Cronkite School. One of them was, in fact, business data, with the flood of data that is available for business reporters. Everything from the Census and the international trade data and so on that the Census Bureau covers, to all the stock market data that gets generated, literally second by second, that can be downloaded from different services. All the Securities and Exchange Commission data that has to be reported regularly by any public company in the United States. So, all those varied sources of data are important sources for story ideas and for the evidence, I guess I would say, that would back up with reporters saying about what’s going on. That’s really what the key thing I would say in being a good business reporter is to be able to understand the various data sources that are out there, use them as true sources for their stories.
Arora: One last question, Steve, before I let you go here. With numbers being the new language of the world that can be used in any category or industry. How would you say data journalism will evolve over the next few years?
Doig: In a way, it will get easier, and certainly has. Back when I got started in data journalism, the early spreadsheet had come out, but it was really just starting to be available. In fact, it was a piece of business software, that’s why it got created. But I wound up having to write programs in a couple of different computer languages to do some of the stories and analyzes I wanted to. Today, that’s not the case usually. I mean, there certainly are really good data journalists who do write programs, who use languages like Python and R and so on to scrape websites to be able to get access to data. But in reality, for lots of other reporters, a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel is so powerful that you know even sort of basic knowledge on that will let you do great storage. So as time goes on, you’ll have more and more of those kinds of tools. And I see widening interest on the part of reporters in realizing that business actually is a great beat for doing stories that people care about, not just the business people who run companies, but the population that works for those companies, and the larger group of populations around where those companies are headquartered, because they’re affected by how well those companies are doing. I think I will see more and more business reporters become really proficient with that and realizing what they can get out of being able to work with that information.
Arora: I’m sure if they have a professor like you, they’ll go very far with it as well. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions today.
Doig: My pleasure.
Arora: Thanks to everyone for listening. Make sure you subscribe and join us next time, as we talk about more business topics and what journalists need to know.
[Outro music]
