& NICAR in this issue offers some guidance for journalists who want to stay afloat while working with the OSHA data.

These articles just touch on what you do. There are plenty of other angles that data-savvy reporters can follow.

Pensions

After the fall of Enron flattened out its employee retirement savings plans, heavy in company stock, St. Paul Pioneer Press business reporter Jim McCartney turned to the web for the local angle.

McCartney wanted to see whether the retirement savings plans offered by the 15 biggest publicly-traded companies in the Twin Cities were loaded with company stock. So he turned to the online 10k Wizard and looked for 11K annual reports the companies submitted to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission that provide detailed financial information about employer 401(k) retirements savings plans. Not all plans are covered; only those in which the employer matches employee contributions in company stock, and grants the employees the right to buy more shares. McCartney said he found the data on 10k Wizard, a subscription service, up to date.

McCartney obtained data about other pension plans at FreeERISA, a site that offers no-cost access to pension plan data collected by the Department of Labor's Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. McCartney said that the data for some companies was outdated by as much as three years.

After looking over the documents and punching the numbers into his calculator, McCartney wrote a Feb. 2 story saying two-thirds of the top companies had 401(k) plans in which company stock accounted for at least 40 percent of the total assets. McCartney found two companies based in the Twin Cities - Target and Best - with company stock concentrations higher than Enron's.

Comfortable with heavy-duty number crunching? You can obtain the entire ERISA database from the U.S. Department of Labor, and compare some 750,000 pension plans across the country. Pension plan administrators every year submit detailed information about the plans using Form 5500, available with other documents on the Department of Labor's Web site. In the coming months, IRE and NICAR will be selling the pension data in an easy-to-use format.

Five years ago, News 12 Long Island reporter Mark Lagerkvist obtained the massive database (a whopping 6gb on 27 9-track tapes!) from the department via a federal Freedom of Information Act request. After carving out smaller data sets and analyzing them, Lagerkvist broadcast "Stolen Dreams," a special report on how employers plundered pension plans.

Foreign/immigrant workers

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, federal agents began sweeping the United States for suspected terrorists, focusing on Middle Eastern men. Foreign visitors, legally in the United States with temporary work visas, were questioned. So were legal immigrants.

So where are these workers? Data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the U.S. Justice Department, can provide some clues. The INS data, sold by the NICAR database library, specifies the sex, age, marital status, country of birth, country of last permanent residency, port of entry and ZIP Code of intended residence for immigrants.

With some rudimentary queries in your database manager, you'd be able to find out what national groups live in your area, and see which occupations are the most prevalent for the groups.

Workers compensation

State workers compensation data, used by journalists investigating bogus injury claims and injury patterns at problem work sites, can be put to other uses.

Last year, reporters at the Washington Post dug through ten years of Maryland Workers Compensation Commission data as they probed the Prince George's County Police Department. [For details, see "Detailing Questionable Police Shootings Required Extensive Search of Documents" in the March-April 2002 issue of The IRE Journal.] While examining fatal shootings by police, the reporters mined the data for cases where police officers filed disability claims because of the stress and emotional trauma related to the shootings. One field in the database covering 700,000 unique claims sometimes contained a detailed narrative of the shootings. After identifying the cases, the reporters obtained the original case documents on file with the commission.

Post reporters used the data again when they were looking at out-of-control police dogs. This time, the reporters queried for cases where police filed disability claims because they were bitten by department canines.

Other journalists have put workers compensation data to use in more traditional ways. In 1997, Mary Fricker and Bob Norberg, reporters at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat analyzed workers comp data and unmasked claims that fraud was behind one third of the disputed cases.