5 takeaways:
➀ A simple question can launch a big project. For NPR investigative producer Huo Jingnan, one such project began when her colleague, reporter Rebecca Hersher, was talking to a Florida homeowner who was selling a house he’d purchased from HUD to FEMA. “So that just got her thinking, ‘Is this an outlier, or is HUD selling more homes in the flood zone? How big of a scale is it, and what does it mean?’ That’s when she did some research, reached out to me, and we teamed up.” Transcript | Video
➁ For FOIA requests, start early and don’t reinvent the wheel. Many government agencies have open data portals, FOIA logs and FOIA reading rooms, which can be the simplest way to get started, Jingnan told Widening the Pipeline fellows. “So even if you file a FOIA request, sometimes you’ll get it faster if you file for something that people have already asked for because that has already gone through the production and redacting process. They can just refer to that and get it right for you.
➂ Always ask for spreadsheets. Otherwise, Jingnan says, you’ll get a version of the statistics that you may not be able to work with. “For the HUD story, they actually gave us a PDF on the outset and I’m like, No. I do not want to OCR this whole thing.’” HUD gave them a spreadsheet right away, sparing them time to clean the data. Ask for a data dictionary or similar documentation that tells you what each column means and the range of those values, Jingnan said. That gives you a guideline on what you can and cannot do with this data.
➃ Who collected the statistics? Think about why the statistics were collected, who funded the data collection, and what data is not being collected, Jingnan advised. “There are many important social issues that there is no data for. You want to think about, ‘Why is the government not funding it? Why are no commercial companies funding it?’ In that case, do you want to build your own data set?”
➄ Look for internal employee surveys. While they won’t contain data that you can use, they show how people in the agency are feeling about the areas they work in, Jingnan said. “Steven Rich at the Washington Post also would ask for ‘wishful data.’ He would look at something and say, ‘Okay, there should be this kind of data there.’ If he can’t locate it yet, he can file records requests asking for it anyway. So the idea is that you want to strike up a conversation with the agency and then hash out what you want in the process.”
The Widening the Pipeline fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation, Bayer AG, J&J and Twitter. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
