Pat Stith
The News & Observer
Raleigh, N.C.
The "why" in any story is often the best part. So that’s where I want to begin.
Why go to the bother — and expense — of building or improving computer assisted reporting programs at our newspapers?
There are a number of reasons, but I offer you just three, any one of which could justify the cost.
ONE, CAR enables us to publish stories that our readers want and can’t get anywhere else. In the midst of all the pushing and shoving for a place at the news table, here’s a banquet of wonderful stories reserved for reporters who can use a computer to analyze data. Without those skills competitors can’t even get in the game.
TWO, CAR helps us recruit and retain good reporters.
All over this country reporters who want to take their work to a higher level have been the driving force behind computer assisted reporting. They know that, other things being equal, reporters who can use a computer will defeat those who can not. And not just defeat them — they’ll beat ‘em like a tub. Publishers and editors who grab the CAR flag, and lead this battle, will send a message to their reporters: Come here, stay here, and we will help you be the best you can be.
THREE, CAR will help us create, or improve, the watchdog culture at our newspapers.
A database, a spreadsheet, helps us get stories that just can’t be acquired any other way. They also help us add depth and detail that fascinate readers.
I want to talk with you first about how CAR has enriched some of our stories, starting with a series we called "Boss Hog, North Carolina Pork Revolution," and then move forward to a series we published in May.
For the “Boss Hog” story we acquired records of almost all calls made with state telephones or state telephone credit cards for a period of two years — about 40 million records. And we made some interesting discoveries.
Murphy Family Farms, the biggest corporate hog farm in the United States at that time, was located in the little town of Rose Hill, in eastern North Carolina. It was headed by former state senator Wendell H. Murphy — "Boss Hog" himself. We found that, on average, someone in state government called Murphy Farms once every working hour of every working day during those two years. Murphy Farms was like a satellite of state government. Or maybe it was the other way around.
One of those calls was made from the legislative office of Vernon G. James, a Pasquotank farmer who was chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. Earlier that day James’ committee had voted to kill a bill that would have imposed tough sewage disposal regulations on hog farms.
When I spoke with James the phone database enabled me to inquire about a specific call -- I knew the date and time. I asked James if he had called Murphy about the sewage regulation bill, and he replied: "I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. Wendell came to me, and he did not like that bill at all."
At The N&O we also have a campaign contribution database we call The Money Machine. When we did the "Boss Hog" story it contained about 250,000 contributions to North Carolina politicians. We found, and reported, that hog executives had given about half a million dollars to candidates.
But one group of gifts stood out.
Three weeks before Gov. Jim Hunt was elected to his third term the Murphys sent him another $20,000 -- $2,000 from Wendell Murphy and $2,000 each from his wife, mother, brother, sister-in-law, sister, daughter, son, daughter-in-law and stepson.
We ran a four-part series last month about overweight trucks and the damage they are doing to roads in North Carolina. The legislature has passed 10 laws in the last 12 years allowing heavier trucks on our highways. And the State Highway Patrol hasn’t done a good job of enforcing the remaining laws.
We used the Money Machine to identify political contributions to legislators and we used a little database we got from the Department of Transportation to find out how many roads in the state have been "posted" for light traffic and how many of those miles are in Wake County, our home county. We used data from the state’s Fuel Tax database to show how much overweight citations and fines have dropped over the last several years.
But we also wanted to give our readers an idea of just how many overweight trucks are out there. You can’t get that from weigh station data because not many people knowingly drive an overweight truck into a weigh station. You can’t get it from portable scales data either because weight officers patrolling back roads don’t weigh everybody — they weigh trucks with fat tires.
So how could we get at that question?
It turns out that for years North Carolina and other states have been conducting pavement studies, using weigh-in-motion sensors to count and weigh trucks. We acquired the North Carolina data — which had not been given to law enforcement officials — and examined records of almost half a million tractor trailers weighed in 2003, the most recent complete year available. We determined that about 8.5 percent were over 80,000 pounds, the legal maximum without a permit on an interstate.
The database contained the time the trucks were weighed and, by sorting on hour, we found something else interesting. The percentage of trucks that were overweight in the wee hours of the morning, when weight enforcement officers are least likely to be on patrol, was triple the percentage of trucks that were overweight during the afternoon.
Almost all Watchdog stories can be improved with computerized data. And some stories simply can not be done without a computer. Let me give you some examples:
• We acquired the state vehicle inspection database, which shows the mileage as well as the make and model of the car or truck. We discovered that about 290,000 vehicle owners in our circulation area — about one in three — were eligible for a high mileage break on city and county property taxes levied on their vehicles. But they have to ask for it, and who knew?
• We used the trooper citation database to show that a 12-man drug interdiction unit was profiling black men. When troopers in the unit stopped a black man they rarely found drugs, so they would charge him with a seat belt violation or some other minor offense. We compared the sex and race of the motorists they cited with citations written by other troopers and found that members of the drug unit was almost twice as likely to charge a black man with a minor offense. One of them charged 27 minorities in a row.
• When a doctor or a nurse accidentally kills someone it is called a "misadventure." No, really, that’s what it’s called. We compared misadventures in the Medical Examiner’s database with misadventures in the state’s death database and found a number of misadventures that had not been reported on the death certificate. None of the misadventures were being turned over to the N.C. Medical Board, which is responsible for weeding out incompetent doctors.
• N. C. State basketball players denied, at first, that they had sold any tickets to their games, a NCAA violation. The team’s guest records were not computerized so we created a database and cranked in those records. ACC tickets are like gold, only better, so we checked their guest list for regular season games against their tournament guest list. Several players invited "guests" to the tournament who had not attended any other game all year. We focused on an "Uncle Ralph" and we asked a player, Who is Uncle Ralph? And he told us, I don’t have an Uncle Ralph. And we said, Sure you do. He was your guest at the ACC Tournament. And the player said, I sold that ticket.
There are two widespread misconceptions about CAR.
It takes forever.
It’s just for projects.
CAR is a lethal investigative weapon. But it also is a wonderful source of features. It’s valuable tool for health and environmental reporters. And business. And cops. And sports. How can we cover politics without following the money? And how can we follow the money without a computer?
CAR also gives us stories that we do just because people will read the fool out of them. I give you three examples
• We answered the question, How fast can you go without getting caught? No matter how you phrase the question, your highway patrol is unlikely say how many miles over the limit it allows. But their ticket database will tell you. Our trooper citation database has fields for speed limit and speed charged and when you have the computer subtract one from the other you discover the magic number: nine. More than 99 percent of all speeding charges made by our state Highway Patrol are for 10 miles per hour or more above the speed limit.
• We used the State Medical Examiner’s database to locate autopsy reports on dozens of unidentified bodies that had been found here there and yonder. Instead of a name, there was a single word in the name field: "UNIDENTIFIED." Joby Warrick wrote the lead: "Whoever killed the woman in the dark Levi’s must have wanted to rub out every trace of her. Even her name."
• We looked at the marriage database and discovered that right many people will not risk being unlucky in love: Every month, on the 13th, the number of marriage ceremonies performed in North Carolina drops by 40 percent.
Building a CAR program takes a little money and a lot of determination. As a rule, there are only two advocates: Reporters, who want to write driving stories. They understand the power of this tool. And top managers, who want outstanding work in their newspapers and believe CAR will help them get it.
You have to find a way to work around your assigning editors. They may say they are CAR advocates, because that’s what they know you want to hear. But they’re not, most of them, and I’ll tell you why. They are under a lot of pressure to fill the paper with good stories. Not great stories. Good stories. And when all is said and done, they’re not willing to give up a couple or three good stories on the possibility, maybe even probability, of getting a great one. A middle manager who pushes his or her reporters to learn CAR is a rare bird.
It is true that some CAR projects are risky because it may take a while to figure out that you’re barking up the wrong tree. So what’s new? That’s always been true of project work, long before we began using databases.
But there are many stories where you can get a one-day turn around.
In building or rebuilding a CAR program at your paper, here are some rules I think you can take to the bank.
• Arm everybody who can shoot.
By that I mean, whatever training program you decide on, open it to everyone. And, don’t worry, you’ll have room. Reporters who don’t routinely use public records in their work, and there are a lot of them, can’t see the point in acquiring a million record database.
• Institutionalize your gains.
Still, at most newspapers, there’s a reporter in the newsroom, often only one, who can make a computer sing. And when they leave you for another newspaper your CAR program goes with them. At The N&O, responsibility for every aspect of the CAR program has been assigned to our News Research Department. News Research maintains our data and data documentation. It loads and analyzes data for reporters who can’t do their own work. It runs the CAR Fellowship Program, teaching reporters.
• Make up your mind to win.
In the movie, "Places in the Heart," Sally Field told her hired hand that, somehow, the cotton was going to get picked.
“I don’t care if it kills me," she said. "I don’t care if it kills you."
With that kind of resolve, she could have built computer assisted reporting programs at our newspapers. So can we.
Getting computerized data is not very different from getting paper records — some agencies readily obey the law and some don’t, or try not to. If your reporters aren’t running into trouble getting public records it’s because they’re not asking for them. Or because they’re giving up without a fight.
The most important thing you can do to build a Watchdog Culture in your newsrooms is to go to war on behalf of your reporters — your readers — on public record issues. That doesn’t always mean a lawsuit. We’re in the publishing business, not the litigating business. But you must be willing to take on the bad guys — that’s what they are, bad guys — in court.
[When McClatchy bought The News & Observer, Gregory Favre and some other executives from California came to The N&O to sooth our nerves, I guess, and introduce themselves. When he met with reporters I told him The N&O had a long history of fighting for access to public records and asked what McClatchy did when it is refused access. He told us that sometimes McClatchy sues ‘em just for the fun of it. I didn’t take that literally, but I thought, we can live with these guys.]
I hope you resolve to become personally involved in record fights including, on occasion, picking up your phone and explaining things to some bureaucrat.
I recommend to you a policy we have at The News & Observer that I think every paper in the country ought to adopt. Here it is:
When a reporter is denied a record that he or she thinks is public they must notify their supervisor. If the supervisor can’t resolve the conflict satisfactorily, they must notify their supervisor. And so on up the ladder, until the problem lands on management mall.
Good reporters like this policy because it brings management, which has far more muscle than we do, into the fray. Management ought to like it too, because you don’t want reporters making policy at your newspapers. And, in effect, that’s what they‘re doing when they allow the government to kick them around on a public record issue.
There are other things that need to be done.
I would hire a reporting coach long before I’d hire a writing coach.
I would invest in my News Research Department. Researchers don’t help you get more stories, they help you get better stories.
But if you don’t answer the bell when the government denies your reporters access to public records, you will not have a watchdog culture in your newsrooms. Your resolve to force the government to release public records is the foundation on which everything else rests.
Pat Stith is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who gives lectures frequently on investigative reporting.