{
  "id": "2001-septemberoctober-adding-context-meaning",
  "slug": "2001-septemberoctober-adding-context-meaning",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-septemberoctober-adding-context-meaning.html",
  "year": 2001,
  "month": "September/October",
  "monthNum": 9,
  "headline": "Adding context, meaning",
  "kicker": "LOCAL REPORTING",
  "author_name": "Rob Gebeloff",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "Star-Ledger",
  "summary": "The Star-Ledger developed a Standardized Town Reporting program to provide contextual, data-driven local government coverage across New Jersey's fragmented municipal system, using computer-assisted reporting to connect individual town stories to broader county and state trends.",
  "keywords": [
    "journalism",
    "data",
    "government"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Government & Politics",
    "Data & Databases"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "spreadsheet"
  ],
  "full_text": "To an outsider, New Jersey seems like an incomprehensible jumble of pavement covered by too many buildings, too many cars and too many people. Which is pretty much how it seems to people who live here too. And when it comes to government, New Jersey, true to form, is ruled by a mind-boggling array of elected bodies - boards, councils, commissions - along with a maze of public authorities that wield power over a wide range of issues, from commuter trans- portation to real estate development in our great swamp, The Meadowlands Covering this smorgasbord of public bodies poses a special challenge. If you try to blanket every city hall, county agency and school board, your news organization will likely go bankrupt, either from the staffing costs, or from all the canceled subscriptions from readers who grow tired of the zoning board minutae you present each day. But providing superficial coverage doesn't work either. Readers want a watchdog - insightful and provocative. In this piece, I'll share with you two of the projects we published to meet that de- mand, then discuss the steps we've taken to build a comprehensive government data intranet to allow reporters to conduct their own simple data analysis, without having to learn spreadsheets and database software. Standardized Town Reporting The Star-Ledger last year launched a pro- gram called Standardized Town Reporting (STR). In short, the goal is to bring context and meaning to our local coverage, both on a daily basis and through special projects. Computer-assisted reporting is a major com- ponent in each area. Too often, local coverage fails to connect the dots. Reporters might cover their towns like a glove, but won't necessarily view their community within the context of the sur- rounding county and state. That flaw gets magnified in a place like New Jersey, where municipalia is an endless string of indepen- dent communities with no natural bound- aries, and where problems that crop up in one community are quite often an issue in 100 others. With STR, we're trying to institutional- ize this big-picture thinking. We want re- porters who come back from a meeting where citizens complain about property taxes in Piscataway to report where Piscataway ranks among its peers in average residential property tax bills. We want stories about the crime rate in Morristown to include data for the last 10 years, not just the last 2 years. We also want to break news by looking in depth at government institutions, but in new ways. Courting Cash The first STR project examined the mu- nicipal court system, an institution that most people encounter far more than city hall but that generally merits only a fraction of the coverage. In New Jersey, there are more than 500 of these local courts, which process all of the parking tickets, moving violations and bar-fight disorderly conduct cases that crop up when you cram 8.4 million people into 7,400 square miles. Most of our readers were probably aware of the municipal court system, and some probably had figured that these courts were partly about justice and partly about raising funds for the town treasury. We turned these vague notions into concrete. We obtained a database that summarized case load and revenues by courthouse, then crossed the figures with a database of town budgets and popula- tion figures. We put together a team of reporters from throughout Ledger-land and told them to ex- amine the numbers for their own communi- ties and then get out to the courts and observe. We then built a package, full of color and anecdote, around these findings: More than $300 million flows through the municipal court system each year, with municipalities keeping nearly three- fifths of that money. While court revenues generally represent a small fraction of a municipality's cash flow - 2.4 percent on average - some towns are downright dependent on court collections. At least 10 New Jersey towns use court money to fund 10 percent of their budgets, with one town using 17 percent. Justice often takes a back seat to conve- nience in municipal cases. In some cases, drivers looking to avoid points and insur- ance charges can plead guilty to municipal offenses that will leave their records clean on a state charge while increasing the municipality's share of the fine. Most of our readers were probably aware of the municipal court system, and some probably had figured that these courts were partly about justice and partly about raising funds for the town treasury. Numerous charts, including a town-by- towner that was locally zoned for eight dif- ferent editions of the paper, accompanied the stories. The Extracurricular Divide For our next STR project, we picked a topic closely aligned with a major ongoing news story. New Jersey courts had ordered a remedy for the wide gap in spending between wealthy and poor school districts. While the state had introduced a special funding program for the poorest of the poor districts, we wanted to take a broader look and compare districts in the bottom quarter of the economic strata with districts in the top quarter. We also wanted to throw extracurricular activities into the mix. Many educators con- sider extracurricular activities to be an essen- tial part of overall development, and after-school programs also are an important com- ponent of college resumes. So the question was natural - are kids reared by poor school districts being put at yet another disadvantage? Our plan of attack was similar to STRI. We assembled a team of reporters from throughout our coverage area, crunched school finance numbers, crossed them with poverty data, had team members analyze the local figures. Then we sent them out to report. Again, we presented a package of stories and graphics zoned for each of our editions Our conclusion: New Jersey has moved rapidly in recent years to close the gap in education spending between rich and poor school districts. But every afternoon, when the school bell rings and the instructional day ends, all the long-standing inequities in public education re-emerge. Even as New Jersey reduced the overall spending gap between rich and poor districts during the past decade - whittling the dis- parity from 18 percent to 7 percent - the gap in spending on extracurricular activities remained a staggering 58 percent. In the state's 100 wealthiest districts, more than $22 of every $1,000 spent goes toward extracurricular activities, we found. In the 100 poorest districts, it's $13. Getting the Data Out I've mentioned in each of these projects how we had team members examine num- bers for their own turf, and I've also men- tioned how we want beat reporters to regu- larly incorporate statistical analysis into their daily reporting. As anybody who's ever tried to get the newsroom hooked on Excel knows, this is a tall order. But we've been quite successful going another route- data intensive, value-added intranet. The key phrase here - and I hate using words like this but I think it applies - is value-added. Since arriving at the Ledger last year, I've devoted a lot of time to develop- ing a library of local government databases, cleaning them so they can be linked together, and putting them up on the newsroom intranet with a newbie-friendly interface. If a reporter wants to rank New Jersey towns by average property tax bill, or query Census data to find the county with the larg- est increase in the Asian-Indian population, they don't have to open a spreadsheet. They can do all that and more from their Web browser. It truly helps get reporters using numbers, and using them in a meaningful, guided way. In addition to a Census query interface (which includes 2000, 1990 and 1980 data), our reporters can browse and rank Claritas in- come data, crime stats, building permits, prop- erty tax data, and all kinds of school data. I make sure each dataset identifies towns by the five-digit Census ID, so linking towns across databases is a snap. In fact, I even built a town background page. A reporter picks a town, and gets back eight pages of data. To make it even more reporter-friendly, I put a link on the page that runs the town name through Mapquest, just in case the reporter needs driving directions. (It's New Jersey, don't laugh). For each of the STR projects, I built a tool specifically for the job. So when we were look- ing at school finance, the team members could call up a page that had all the relevant data for every district in their county. Or, they could rank districts in any single category, filtering for district size and poverty ranking. While it takes a bit of work to program all of this (I used VBScript and active server pages), the benefits are many. For one, it truly helps get reporters using numbers, and using them in a meaningful, guided way. It's like truly being the database editor - wading through the mounds of data and pulling out the key figures that are needed to compare and contrast. And in the long run, the work I put in up front saves me time later. I don't have to run Access queries for 20 reporters every day. In- stead, they can do a lot on their own through their Web browser. The bottom line with STR is that we have 566 towns, including 200 in our direct circu- lation area. By looking at the big picture, we're starting to put this mess of home rule into some perspective - exactly what readers want. Rob Gebeloff can be reached by e-mail at rgebeloff@starledger.com",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "pre-v2",
    "extracted_at": "",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
    {
      "slug": "2002-november-december-data-boosts-crime-stories",
      "score": 0.152
    },
    {
      "slug": "1997-july-keeping-car-local",
      "score": 0.151
    },
    {
      "slug": "2003-julyaugust-tallying-the-bill-for-unused-sick-time",
      "score": 0.145
    },
    {
      "slug": "2006-march-april-finding-surprises-in-drug-arrest-files",
      "score": 0.145
    },
    {
      "slug": "1997-march-tracking-the-trends",
      "score": 0.137
    }
  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-septemberoctober-adding-context-meaning.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-septemberoctober-adding-context-meaning.json"
}