{
  "id": "2000-october-boot-camp-lessons",
  "slug": "2000-october-boot-camp-lessons",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-october-boot-camp-lessons.html",
  "year": 2000,
  "month": "October",
  "monthNum": 10,
  "headline": "Boot camp lessons",
  "kicker": "FIRST VENTURE",
  "author_name": "Edward L. Carter",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "Deseret News",
  "summary": "A journalist describes lessons learned from a NICAR computer-assisted reporting boot camp while analyzing city employee salary data for a pay equity story, emphasizing the importance of understanding open records laws, requesting complete datasets, and starting with a manageable minimum story approach.",
  "keywords": [
    "salary",
    "data",
    "journalism"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Demographics & Census"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Excel"
  ],
  "full_text": "Analyzing city employee salaries for a story on pay equity reinforced three lessons I learned at NICAR's computer-assisted reporting boot camp:\n\n- Do your homework\n- Get everything\n- Guarantee the \"minimum story\"\n\nMy 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.\n\nWith 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.\n\nMy first lesson\n\nThe 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.\n\nAfter 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.\n\nWhen 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.\n\nGetting everything\n\nMy 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.\n\nAdditionally, 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.\n\nMinimum story\n\nThird, 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nEdward L. Carter can be reached by e-mail at carter@desnews.com",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
    {
      "slug": "1998-july-upcoming-boot-camps",
      "score": 0.262
    },
    {
      "slug": "2003-marchapril-kbs-boot-camp",
      "score": 0.242
    },
    {
      "slug": "1998-september-upcoming-boot-camps",
      "score": 0.228
    },
    {
      "slug": "2004-march-first-venture-principals-cash-in-on-sick-pay",
      "score": 0.212
    },
    {
      "slug": "1998-october-upcoming-boot-camps",
      "score": 0.191
    }
  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-october-boot-camp-lessons.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-october-boot-camp-lessons.json"
}