Mark Lagerkvist of News 12 Long Island was on a plane home from Los Angeles in 1995 when he got the idea for a computer-assisted story that would later consume six months of his life.
The USA Today he was reading contained a one-paragraph blurb about a 401(K) plan that had been pilfered by an employer.
"Is this just an isolated event or is there something systemic?" Lagerkvist asked himself. "I became more curious. Once I started pulling clips, doing Nexis searches, and started looking at reference materials, it became apparent there were weaknesses in the pension system."
No plan's grand
Lagerkvist, grappling with truly massive amounts of data, began squeezing out those disparaging weaknesses:
Most pension nest eggs are being watched by the employers. As Lagerkvist says, this allows "the fox to guard the henhouse."
Fewer than 10 percent of plans are legally required to have audits on any kind of regular basis. Most are not insured by the government.
There's no way the resources of federal agencies can effectively protect the nation's 750,000 private pension plans from piracy.
Eventually "Stolen Dreams" was broadcast in a three-part series on News 12, followed by a half-hour documentary. Following the broadcasts, several indictments were handed down to Long Island-area 401(K) embezzlers. One such case turned out to be the largest known case of pension theft in the country.
Data behemoth
However, the road was long, rough and littered with dirty data. Lagerkvist had to put up with what he called a "computer-assisted reporting nightmare." He went mano a mano with 6 gigabytes of raw government data, produced after a much-delayed FOIA request. Lagerkvist was not initially equipped to deal with the enormity. "The database basically included an abstract for all 750,000 pension plans in the U.S. on 27 nine-track tapes. At the time I was using a 486 with a 400-meg hard drive. I had to go out and buy a 2-gig hard drive just to handle this project. Even then I had to be very selective what kind of data I imported."
Field selection
The next step: the harrowing narrowing process.
"I think the key is to find out what data is important and what fields of data and information are important for your research. You can always go back later and create a second database. It's important to start basic and add the things you think are critical."
Lagerkvist advises any reporter with an urge to work with a massive database to do some homework first in order to get a solid idea of what oddities to look for.
"When you get a massive amount of data like this, you don't go into a project like this without a clue. I didn't go out and get those tapes just because they were there."
The sheer size of the project was unlike anything he had encountered in his years of investigative reporting. And while he asserts his insistence on being the only one to "get his hands dirty" with the data, he still recommends finding a mentor who knows more about computer-assisted reporting.
Lagerkvist acknowledged his indebtedness to Drew Sullivan, once with NICAR and now with the Associated Press.
"It's helpful to have someone to bounce the technical questions off of. Of course NICAR would tell me that's why they exist, and that's fine, too."