Analyzing city employee salaries for a story on pay equity reinforced three lessons I learned at NICAR's computer-assisted reporting boot camp:
- Do your homework - Get everything - Guarantee the "minimum story"
My initial attempt at applying what I learned at a March boot camp was the well-traveled "pet name" story, which seemed to make an impression on readers and editors of the Deseret News, a 70,000-circulation daily in Salt Lake City.
With that small success under my belt, I decided to research employee salaries for two cities on my beat. Editors asked me to expand it regionally. The result was a story about the challenges facing female employees in Utah's patriarchal culture.
My first lesson
The first lesson I learned was the importance of doing your homework, especially on FOI issues. When I approached the cities' personnel directors, I was told I could have ranges of salaries but not the exact earnings of employees. However, I knew from researching my state's open records laws that salaries had to be disclosed. I submitted formal requests and waited.
After the obligatory stops on the attorneys' desks, my requests were approved. One city told me I would have to pay a programmer's hourly costs to run my reports. I recalled IRE and NICAR Executive Director Brant Houston's advice ("Your negotiating position should begin at zero," he told us) and I told the personnel director I wouldn't pay unless they first told me how much per hour and how many hours it would require. Two days later, I got a call saying a floppy disk was ready for me. Money was never discussed again.
When I attempted to convert the disk's text file into a Microsoft Excel document, I ran into a snag. Only about half the data came in, and I couldn't find the rest. Bypassing administrators, I called the programmer back and asked him to re-send the salary data in Excel format.
Getting everything
My second lesson was to follow Brant's advice about getting everything. I recall him saying at boot camp that it's easier to remove unnecessary data than it is to fight for information a second time. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way. I had only asked for employee names, salaries and job titles. Once I began running some pivot table reports, I realized I also needed tenure and the city department in which the employee worked (it wasn't always obvious from the job title). I ended up going back to the cities to get the departments, but I never got the years of service. I also had to backtrack and get employees' gender since I couldn't tell from some of the names.
Additionally, I neglected to push for the record layouts and code sheets, which was stressed at boot camp. In this case, I was able to work through the problem.
Minimum story
Third, I learned the value of the "minimum story." Being a computer-assisted reporting novice, I didn't want to get in over my head. After spending several days perusing and sorting the data, I had several ideas about where the story could go. But the most obvious thing — and the easiest story to do — was that female employees were very scarce at the top management levels. In one city, only two women graced the 100 top-paid employees. I also realized that women were concentrated in jobs as secretaries, police dispatchers and librarians — not a revelation, to be sure, but the data allowed me to quantify it.
I pursued that angle, and used a few simple Web searches to gather information from a couple of national organizations about pay gaps between male-dominated jobs and female-dominated jobs. One of the most interesting results came from pivot table reports I ran to compare men and women who held the same job titles. That showed that women who got the same jobs as men earned comparable salaries, but the hang-up was that few women had crossed the line from the traditional female jobs to the traditional male jobs. Readers responded well to the story, a topic of interest not frequently investigated in this state.
Edward L. Carter can be reached by e-mail at carter@desnews.com