Tales from the field
When John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crashed the night of July 16, several reporters were able to take their coverage beyond the rest of the pack using some simple computer-assisted reporting techniques.
It didn't take number-crunching expertise. It didn't take a lot of powerful software. Access to the Internet and a little digging helped produce some powerful and compelling stories.
Here are a couple tales of how they did it:
Robert Gebeloff, The Record
In North Jersey, the Kennedy story was a huge affair. Not only is The Record in the New York media market, but Kennedy's plane took off from a local airport.
Needless to say, Gebeloff was called in to work early on Saturday (July 17) morning, along with two transportation reporters, police reporters, a news aide vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, and anyone else lucky enough to be home when phone rang.
While most people think of CAR as a number-crunching endeavor, Gebeloff said they crunched zero numbers for the Kennedy story, yet managed to make key contributions throughout the paper's exhaustive coverage.
Gebeloff used various aviation databases like a well-placed source - a source who provided leads to key information that was used to make stories more interesting and authoritative.
That Saturday, The Record staff decided to produce a piece about aviation safety, putting this crash in context. How often do single engine planes go down? What are the causes? How does this compare to other modes of transportation?
Some may have tried to compile all of this from the Federal Aviation Administration or National Transportation Safety Board aviation databases, but many of these numbers are already summarized in various government reports - which The Record already had on hand.
What made The Record story more distinctive was its ability to cite other recent plane crashes - in detail, Gebeloff said. They downloaded data from the FAA's Office of Accident Investigation (www.faa.gov/avr/aai/aaihome.htm), which provides preliminary accident reports from the prior 10 days.
While the data are preliminary, there's a narrative in there so you get an idea of what happened. Using Lexis/Nexis, they found news accounts of the accidents.
As the story unfolded, some began wondering aloud whether the search-and-rescue effort was more extensive for Kennedy than in other crashes. The Record staff decided to find the families and associates of previous fatal accidents and let them answer the question.
To find those people, Record reporters used three aviation databases to pull information on fatal plane crashes over water: FAA, NTSB and the Aviation Safety Reporting System.
Gebeloff said the key to the coverage was in the details.
"Using the narratives in the reports, news accounts of the accidents, and, most importantly, interviews with victim family members and associates, we were able to produce a compelling read that was fact-based and answered a question on everyone's mind," he said.
Robert Gebeloff can be reached by e-mail at gebeloff@bergen.com
Susan Milton, Cape Cod Times
While other reporters gathered information from the scene, Cape Cod Times reporter Susan Milton turned to the Internet for a few answers.
And she found plenty. The plane registration papers that washed up on shore didn't have John F. Kennedy Jr.'s name, but by plugging into a commercial Web site, www.landings.com, she found the name of the company and address the plane was registered to. (Landings has a great deal of information about planes and pilots not found elsewhere, but reporters who have used it suggest using caution with the information found there).
At the same site, Milton pulled up Kennedy's pilot's license information. The addresses matched.
At the NTSB Web site, she collected reports for all the fatal crash reports for all airports on Cape Cod and the area islands over the past 10 years. That, combined with clips from the paper's archives, led to a story on the high number of accidents due to errors by inexperienced pilots in bad weather.
After the plane was recovered, some media outlets were reporting that the Kennedy family was considering a burial at sea.
Milton turned to a search engine and typed in "burial at sea." That led to a copy of the Navy Burial Service (a portion of which became the story's lead) and a phone number to the U.S. Navy's Office of Mortuary Affairs.
The representative there yielded a wealth of information: what it takes to get a burial at sea through the Navy; history of burials at sea and a rough estimate of how many have been conducted; and a tip that the Coast Guard also performed similar rites. Much of the information was useful in determining whether the Kennedy family was getting special treatment, Milton said.
Milton also used the Internet to find the Environmental Protection Association's requirements for a burial at sea and statistics on cremations and burials from a national funeral association.
"(The Internet) enabled us to put a lot of what happened to John F. Kennedy Jr. and the two sisters into perspective and context for readers," Milton said. "It was a great source for background information on the registration that washed to shore and allowed us to write a lot of informed stories about burials at sea and other accidents in the area."
For reporters covering similar crashes in the future, Milton suggested looking at the aviation accident reports available online to see if there are any similarities or differences and put the latest crash into context.
"Don't hesitate to ask a question on the Internet," Milton said. "It might lead you to a direction you might not have considered."
Susan Milton can be reached by e-mail at smilton@capecodonline.com