5 takeaways:

➀ Add to your calendar now: Filing deadlines. A must-do for political investigations is tracking which documents you want and when they are released, said Soo Rin Kim, a data reporter for ABC News. “Campaign finance reports can be monthly or quarterly or biennial depending on the types of committees, and they’re all laid out in the FEC (Federal Election Commission) website. Lobbying disclosure reports are always quarterly. Personal financial disclosures are trickier because it depends on the person and when they assumed their position,” Kim said. “Always have a running list of things that you’re interested in. For example, I always keep track of the [Republican National Committee] and the [Democratic National Committee’s campaign finance reports. I’m always looking out for Trump’s Save America PAC’s disclosure reports, as well as Biden’s campaign.”

➁ Data is great. You still need to talk to people. No matter how great your data is, you’ll never be able to track everything. “You always have to continue talking to sources despite all the great information you can get from these documents and data,” Kim said. “You have to talk to donors, lobbyists or staffers, as well as watchdog groups and experts to see what’s actually going on behind the scenes.” Talking to human sources helps you explain how the data will affect your human audience. Interviews can also help you land on a unique angle for your data story, USA Today senior data reporter Aleszu Bajak said. When reviewing data sets, “we may be spending a couple weeks on this. Academics may have spent two decades on this,” Bajak said. Make use of their expertise and deeper understanding of the numbers.

➂ Do the four-corners test. Basic routines can make life as a data journalist easier. One is the “four corners test:” Every time you open a new spreadsheet, look at the columns furthest to the left and right and the top and bottom rows to get a sense of the scope of the data. Familiarize yourself, then try translating the number that interests you into a sentence, Bajak advised. “Getting into the habit of that really helps you communicate with your editors and obviously with your readers what those numbers mean and the context of them,” he said. Another tip for good data hygiene: Develop a standard naming structure for organizing all data sheets and projects to help you (and editors) retrace your steps.

➃ Visuals are integral to storytelling, not afterthoughts. Many but not all top data journalists prototype visualizations as they go. People tend to either “get over-excited about the possibilities of data visualization or data journalism, and they do things that have too many best bells and whistles but not enough storytelling,” or simply “think, ‘Oh, maybe we can do a chart,’ but that chart is completely useless. If you take it out, nobody will notice, it’s like an appendix,” said Sergio Peçanha, a visual columnist for The Washington Post. For him, data visualizations, graphics, photos and illustrations are “fundamental for you to be able to complete the thought.” “The chart is helping to clarify the point that you’re making … proving what you’re showing,” he said. Bajak said he often creates far more data visualizations than end up in the published version of the story. “Simple works,” he said. Ultimately, it comes down to “what’s our responsibility to readers? … I’m not here to placate the Twitterati. I’m here to communicate these numbers to our readers.”

➄ Don’t placate the Twitterati … or even your editor. We all know the rule “correlation does not equal causation,” but journalists still may jump to conclusions when politics gets involved, Bajak said. “[Politics] is rife with over-categorization and simplifying narratives. The media, I think, is very prone to that. With data and with you standing in as the more cautious reviewer of that analysis, I would urge you to push back against editors that want to simplify or change the language” to get a grabbier headline or lede. Bajak, who was a scientist before he became a journalist, loves what the two have in common: empiricism. “I’m not just going to find a data set and publish it, right? I’m going to try to answer a question,” he said.

Speakers: 

Aleszu Bajak, Senior Data Reporter, USA Today

Soo Rin Kim, Data Reporter, ABC News

Sergio Pecanha, Opinion Columnist, The Washington Post

This program was funded by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.