As I walked out of a prominent state senator's office following an interview, he and his spokeswoman handed me a plastic bag. In it were two bars of high-quality chocolate imprinted with his campaign logo, a coffee mug with the same design, a bottle of a spice rub suitable for beef, chicken or fish, and a bottle of steak sauce regularly sold at the politician's premier fundraiser. 'You know,' I told the spokeswoman, a longtime source, 'I can take this only if I do a story on it someday.' She laughed.
Six months later, I sat at my desk and stared at the mug. It was gathering dust on a corner of my desk. I had just returned home from an IRE and NICAR Boot Camp and was eager to prove that I don't believe in junkets - and wouldn't go to Columbia, Mo., for one even if I did. Why is steak sauce important to a political campaign? That was the key element of my first computer-assisted reporting project: A question.
Finding New York's campaign finance database online was easy. After that, I had to fall back on my Boot Camp training. Two pieces of advice became immediately useful - even critical - in doing the story: First, find a buddy to review your work. In my case, I tapped Brad Heath. He's a reporter in Detroit now, but he was my predecessor as Binghamton's CAR person and understands my experience as a reporter and my virtually nonexistent database skills.
In fact, he knew the data I was working with, too, because he had briefly played with it. Second, give the database to the source. The campaign treasurer had done all the paperwork in filing the information, and it was in his interest to make sure I got my facts straight. He found a couple of errors in my queries. And with more than 3,000 potential sources, I still kept total control of what the story said.
I learned a few other lessons. Do everything two or three times. It wasn't until I exported my query results to Excel and checked the math that I realized the numbers didn't add up, and it was because of a problem in my query. At Boot Camp, they called these data integrity checks, and they are important. Review the data. The quick and easy task is to find the extremes in your data, and that frequently can be useful.
But go through the rest of it, too. You'll come up with more questions. Why, for example, couldn't I find the local Republican leaders contributing to the area's most prominent Republican, but I could find their spouses? You're not going to notice that unless you know both the data and your subject. I'm primarily a beat reporter so that kind of analysis was easy, even fun, once my co-workers and I made a game of finding how many names we recognized.
I don't know how a reporter could do that coming into the data cold. I also had to learn what the data wasn't telling me, which meant I had to learn what it was supposed to say. Candidates for New York's state legislature generally contribute to a party 'housekeeping' fund to pay for legal advice, polls and whatnot. Other politicians had contributed to it, according to my analysis, but the state senator hadn't.
Either he was the state's biggest political cheapskate (unlikely) or there was another fund out there the data didn't have a record of. I had to learn to keep focus on my story - how the senator's campaign spent its money. There were plenty of other tempting angles to pursue. Why was the ambassador to Grenada my boy's biggest individual contributor? And was the fact that he was indicted about 15 years ago (and later exonerated) on charges alleging he blew up trailers of a union protesting one of his facilities relevant?
Fascinating stuff, but it wasn't part of the story I had in mind. Maybe next time. That's the lure of a good database. It gives you a garbage load of ideas. You can't do them all. Even if you could... you probably shouldn't. Overkill can be a nasty habit, and with all the time I sank into this project, it was a temptation. CAR stories are inexpensive compared with other investigative stories of similar depth, but they're inefficient compared with traditional methods.
That can be an issue at a community newspaper, where cutting somebody free from the daily need to feed the beast can be a burden on everybody else. Fortunately, Heath taught my editors that so I didn't have to. Through all of this, Heath double-checked my work and cheered me up when I felt dumb. With his help, I learned to rewrite queries to make them as simple as possible. The easy.