5 takeaways:

➀ A Spotlight project in days instead of weeks? The Boston Globe uncovered the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse by creating manual spreadsheets based on largely on administrative records. Today’s technology, which would allow for scanning those records, turning them into text and importing them into spreadsheets, would turn weeks of data work into days, possibly even hours, said Andrew Ba Tran, Pulitzer-winning investigative data reporter for The Washington Post. “You can quickly create a pivot table in Excel and figure out a pattern, how often did a priest move. … I did this as an exercise with my students. And … we got through a lot in just like one and a half hours,” Tran said. “So imagine three weeks of work condensed … you could do all that analysis that they did for Spotlight within a few hours, probably a day if you have enough people, just using this technology.”

➁ Simple data, wide-ranging impact. “There was nothing fancy about our spreadsheet,” Boston Globe reporter Matt Carroll said later. “Yet nothing else I’ve done came close to having the impact of that simple spreadsheet.” While computers understand true and false, humans understand right from wrong, Tran pointed out. “Just because the data is simple, doesn’t mean you can’t have major implications,” he said. The Globe investigation is one of the most impactful of the last 20 years, resulting in thousands more accounts of abuse and millions of dollars in settlements for victims.

➂ All you really need to know are spreadsheets. But …“The only technical skill you need for effective data journalism, it’s just knowing your way around the spreadsheet,” Tran said. “Your lack of math and data science skills is not what keeps you from being a data journalist.” However, knowing other tools can also make your life easier. Although Tran teaches R, for those who don’t know R or Python, he suggested DataMiner.io for web scraping. For mapping data, he suggested Geocode.io, the Census Bureau’s Geocoder or Google Maps API (not free).

➃ Think laterally. When the data you want isn’t there, Tran advised data fellows to go to other sources. For example, he wanted to find out if Black people were more likely to be denied FEMA aid. FEMA didn’t have that data. “So what we had to do, was had to mash it up with census data, and figure out where did these rejection rates occur in counties that were, were they Black majority or were they white majority?” Tran said. “We had to figure out a proxy.”

➄ What journalists can learn from The Little Prince.  Tran used a children’s book to drive home a key lesson for data reporters. In the classic story, “The Little Prince,” the narrator shows a drawing to adults. They all think it is a hat, but to the child, it is a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant. The lesson? Don’t take things at face value. Have imagination. “We are always going to be presented various versions of this hat, but we as journalists already have the instincts to try to look deeper, to solve problems using creative and not obvious ways,” Tran said.

Speaker: 

Andrew Ba Tran, Investigative Data Reporter, The Washington Post

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