The date of the release of the first Cen- sus data was like election night in a for- eign country: There was the deadline pres- sure to get stories, charts and our first ArcView maps in the paper, and the re- sults arrived in a format that was unknown previously (New Jersey came out first) and we couldn't be sure we'd even get it, never mind be able to work with it. Even more SO than for the big boys, good planning is crucial to success at smaller papers.
That made the release of the second set of local numbers - the demographic pro- files - a cakewalk by comparison, since we had a nearly weeklong embargo and had the experiences of other states to model. Advance planning key Yet in both cases, advanced planning in the extreme was the key to getting solid, complete data packages that stood up to the competition in the next day's paper despite our smaller size and much smaller resources.
Even more so than for the big boys, good planning is crucial to success at smaller papers - we have a circulation around 50,000, a staff of about 15 news reporters and a part-time CAR person (me). I used everything I learned at a couple of Census seminars and from the Census e-mail lists to do as much work as pos- sible in advance. That's what really made both Census experiences relatively smooth. And these same steps are the ones I continue to use in planning for the SF1 release.
First, we examined the data to be re- leased and determined likely stories and graphics, leaving room for deviation when the numbers said something unexpected - as they did when the Census apparently missed counting hundreds of people in two of our towns. We wrote detailed story budgets and produced dummy charts and maps that we refined in advance so little editing was needed on deadline. Dummy databases Most importantly, I set up dummy da- tabases in Access in advance.
I brought in all the old data against which I'd be com- paring. For my 2000 files, I used specs from the Census Web site and from Gannett News Service - they've been in- valuable to many Gannett papers. Then I wrote queries that would pull out only the towns and counties we'd want and show the changes we wanted, with all columns ordered the way it would eventually ap- pear in the paper. Thanks, Paul Overberg, for this advice!
I knew I'd become a geek when I found myself singing and dancing with delight at my desk when my queries pro- duced perfect tables in seconds on re- districting day. We also did as much advance report- ing work as possible. Because I knew I wouldn't have the time to write on the date of the PL94 release but I wanted at least one byline in the package, I wrote largely in advance a story on the change in the population of our coverage area over the century - few papers still seem to have done the story looking at population changes over the 1900s, but I thought it was perfect.
Since we pretty well knew the trends in advance, I had to do little more than plug in numbers that day. On deadline, we produced a four-page special section that covered the major trends and provided several types of chart and maps. We followed up with profiles of neighborhoods and dominant racial groups in our region and stories about growing diversity and growing segregation. We were a little more lax with our preparations for the demographic profile data, in part because I was busy on other stories and didn't have as much time to devote to the preparations and in part be- cause we let the length of the embargo lull us into a false sense of security.
The planning was there, as were the old data and the 2000 data shells. But I didn't have time to write all the queries in ad- vance, which meant I had to spend more time querying data and had less for report- ing when the data was released in May. It got done, but I had to work much of a really nice spring weekend on it. I knew I'd become a geek when I found myself singing and dancing with delight at my desk when my queries produced perfect tables in seconds on redistricting day.
The main problem we ran into was the discovery of a missing 10-year boy's body the day before the embargo was lifted. That bumped us below the fold and took all our front page space for a chart and photo. It also took some of our inside space, so we lost a chart, a map and a sidebar. But over the course of the three days, we got just about everything in, again, covering all our bases. Covering readership helped For the release of the demographic data, and we suspect everything else coming out, we've built more flexibility into our plan- ning.
It's pretty easy to know how your population is growing or shrinking and whether it is diversifying if you cover your readership area well. But the demographic specifics - families with kids, senior citi- zens, age brackets - are harder to predict. When it turned out our senior popula- tion had grown by nearly 25 percent, we did a quick story explaining the trend in part, more senior citizens complexes be- ing built by towns to fulfill a state court mandate to provide affordable housing in wealthy Morris County.
It keeps getting harder to do a good job with these numbers. For the SF1 release, we've again exam- ined the data and planned our stories but there's so much of it, I hope we're cover- ing all the major bases. There's a lot of data I know we won't need - the number of 28-year olds by race is at least one, I'm guessing. Still, I can only hope the com- petition doesn't find some tremendously interesting story by analyzing some in- nocuous factoid I'm planning to ignore.
I'm also checking the Web sites of pa- pers in states with earlier release dates than New Jersey for ideas. Cross-referencing data Once again, I'm pulling comparable data off the 1990 STF1 CD and creating dummy files. I've read a lot about the in- ability of Access to work with the huge files being released - New Jersey's is 1.7 gigabytes - and ways to work around it. I've chosen to break the data into several (four is what I'm aiming for) smaller da- tabases.
I'm cross referencing so I know what data is where. And I'll be writing as many queries as I can in advance. I'm also preparing my list of contacts and plan to make as many phone calls in advance as possible for comments on the expected trend stories we've planned - reaching out for gay couples is the obvi- ous one because doing such a story is al- most a sure thing and finding couples on deadline could be difficult.
I'd really like to be able to take time off on the summer weekend the SF1 data is released. With my luck, I'll get the ad- vance work done and it will rain. Colleen O'Dea can be reached by e- mail at codcod@worldnet.att.net