tallized after several mass shootings in 1999, including Columbine High School and the Atlanta day trader shootings.
"There was a notion in people's heads that there's a strong sense of concern about this 'new' violence," he said. "We set out to explain it and it started as a regular, narrative newspaper story but we decided to go deeper."
Fessenden said the biggest problem the team faced was defining the terms used for researching rampage killings. The Times used its news research department as well as the AP's state wires to gather information.
"News databases are nowhere near as complete as you think," he said. "There's lots of holes in coverage and big differences between Dow Jones and Lexis-Nexis."
To manage the huge amounts of information, the team turned to NewsEngin and Lotus databases for data entry and analysis.
Fessenden said the series faced hurdles because there was a lack of quality social science research on rampage killings to give context to their findings. The series used the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports for details on each killing.
To balance news databases such as Lexis-Nexis and Dow Jones, which have limited information prior to the mid-1980s, Meyer suggested getting back to people. "Identify that 'old guy' in the newsroom and ask them what they remember," he said. "Ask the librarians and compare it with what you have for the 1980s to give you some way to estimate the error rate." In response, Fessenden said he was limited by the data they had access to. "If we had gone further, it would have been a geometric increase in work," he said. "But we didn't base any data over time on our database-that was from the Supplemental Homicide Report." While both Reeves and Fessenden admitted the stories were starting points, Meyer congratulated them for the work and their ability to convince management that the projects were worth doing. "This is social science because it tells you what they did and how they did it," Meyer said. Paul Monies can be reached by e-mail at paulm@nicar.org