{
  "id": "1997-march-babies-buildings-and-bureaucrats",
  "slug": "1997-march-babies-buildings-and-bureaucrats",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-march-babies-buildings-and-bureaucrats.html",
  "year": 1997,
  "month": "March",
  "monthNum": 3,
  "headline": "Babies, buildings and bureaucrats",
  "kicker": "CAR serves many purposes",
  "author_name": "Natalya Shulyakovskaya",
  "author_title": "Newsroom Researcher",
  "affiliation": "St. Louis Post-Dispatch",
  "summary": "A journalism graduate describes his early career at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a newsroom researcher, sharing lessons learned from data-driven reporting projects on topics ranging from birth records to abandoned buildings.",
  "keywords": [
    "journalism",
    "data",
    "reporting"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Journalism & Newsroom"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "SQL"
  ],
  "full_text": "I graduated in May 1996 from the University of Missouri and was soon hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (I had a summer internship there a year before). The paper created a funky position called newsroom researcher - not a writing job, but a full-fledged computer-assisted reporting berth and I signed on. I came to the Post-Dispatch to work with George Landau. So I tinkered with SQL server (some), collected a lot of data and worked as a free agent on different projects with different reporters. In the months that followed, I analyzed Missouri state pensions, St. Louis city cellular phone use, medical data, abandoned and vandalized buildings, local campaign contributions and voter registration. I requested and got a lot more data than I was able to turn into stories. I didn't put nearly as much data on the SQL server as I should have. And I made my mistakes. Here is a cheat sheet that I slowly compiled.\n\nNo More Babies\n\nWhen you get a new job, it's great to start with something not-so-complicated. Choose your first data projects carefully - it is likely you will come back to these data over and over again. Besides, your colleagues will remember you as a person doing \"SUCH and SUCH.\" I didn't strategize and I ended up measuring babies. The Post-Dispatch had gotten several years worth of birth records for the state of Missouri. No names, but the rest of the data is intact and you can fish out all sorts of amazing information (medical procedures and complications, parents' educational level, prenatal care, etc.) My affair with the data started when an editor came to our geek nook and waived a press release about big babies in front of me. Scientists in Illinois studied babies, documented that as a norm the current newborns are much bigger than the charts that are used by the pediatricians to measure their progress. \"Can we look at Missouri infants?\" the editor asked.\n\nWe did - we charted baby weight, found some doctors who specialized in delivering huge newborns and talked to moms whose sons wore clothes for 3-year-olds right after their birth.\n\nSeveral weeks later, I was back working on a story about the skyrocketing number of multiple births. Now, whenever I pass our metro desk talking about stories, I get a grin from that editor: \"No more babies,\" he mutters. But now I have sources in the State Center for Health Statistics.\n\n$3 Million Question\n\nYou need to discuss your findings with your subjects, but you need to be careful - they would love to steal your show.\n\nSt. Louis has thousands of dilapidated abandoned buildings, and we decided to look at where they are and what the city is doing about them. Last summer, two kids were found dead on two different occasions in two different buildings in North St. Louis.\n\nWe got a copy of the city's demolition permits, a survey of the vacant and vandalized buildings that the building inspectors compile every year, a database of condemnations and started looking at the neighborhoods that were decaying.\n\nAs we were nearing the deadline, we talked to the building commissioner, inspectors, the grandmother of the dead girl and an occasional PR person from the City Hall who was always curious: \"So when is your story going to run?\" Then they saw our final data runs.\n\nOn Friday, before our Sunday story hit the presses, the St. Louis mayor declared he was pouring an extra $3 million into demolitions. It didn't kill the story, but made me much more careful when I worked on the next city-related project.\n\n18 Minute Gaps\n\nRead and check the data as soon as the tapes land on your lap.\n\nAfter a couple of weeks of working with a cumbersome and complicated file tracking pensions for Missouri Highway Patrol and Transportation Department, I discovered that multiple fields in the middle of the file were missing. Cold sweat was dripping down my face.\n\nIt turned out that a programmer forgot to include those fields in a read-out program. We got the tape back in two days. At that point I was glad my data clean-up was saved in a program.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
    {
      "slug": "1995-february-car-routine-in-st-louis",
      "score": 0.253
    },
    {
      "slug": "1996-september-car-in-any-newsroom",
      "score": 0.188
    },
    {
      "slug": "1992-july-bytes-bits-and-nibbles",
      "score": 0.148
    },
    {
      "slug": "2000-julyaugust-car-specialists",
      "score": 0.144
    },
    {
      "slug": "2000-october-boot-camp-lessons",
      "score": 0.144
    }
  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-march-babies-buildings-and-bureaucrats.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-march-babies-buildings-and-bureaucrats.json"
}