Today's NYT “Week in Review” carries Daniel Okrent's column, “The Public Editor.”  This week's solid piece — “Briefers and Leakers and the Newspapers Who Enable Them” — takes another deserved shot at the use of unattributed and/or anonymous sourcing. 
But both Okrent and the NYT fall short in providing adequate
transparency and leveraging of the digital environment to the benefit
of both readers and the newspaper.

Okrent reports on some analytic work regarding the NYT's use of sourcing
practices, work carried out by a grad student at NYU, Jason B.
Williams.  Okrent gives appropriate attribution to Williams and
his data and, let's assume, reported it correctly.  But he only reported the data.  At the
end of the essay, Okrent quotes NYT editor Bill Keller: “'We need to
get our policies [regarding sourcing] hard-wired into the brains of our
reporters and editors that we are obliged to tell readers how we know
what we know,' Bill Keller told me the other day.” [The IAJ's emphasis added.]



Here Keller and Okrent disappoint us by prompting one of the fundamental admonitions to novice journalists:  Don't TELL the reader, SHOW the reader what you know.



The way
to build reader confidence and improve the relevance of journalism
would have been to provide an online link to Williams' raw data so readers
could explore it for even richer insights and draw their own
conclusions. 

The
current issue of WIRED (or is it only the online WIRED News?  I'm
not always sure which is which.) carrieds a piece on what Amazon is
doing with its search engines to tease data out of the PDF books it
carries.  “Judging a Book by its Contents”
includes the following from Amazon exec. Bill Carr.  Oh that news
organizations could bring the same type of thinking to their archives.

Bill Carr, Amazon's executive vice president of digital media, confirms that this is a serious attempt to sell more books.

“We've been spending a lot of time thinking, 'We have this rich digital
content, how can we pull info out and expose it to customers that makes
discovery even better?'” Carr said. “What you are seeing here are the
fruits of a lot experimenting and brainstorming.”

Carr points to the “adaptive unconscious” SIP from Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, Blink, as an example of how improbable data mining can get a curious reader into the long tail of Amazon's catalog.”

Benjamin Vershbow, a researcher at the Institute for the Future of the Book,”…sees Amazon's data mining as part of a trend on the web where sites are
learning to weave data sources together to create a new web experience.”

Someone, and it won't be a newspaper or magazine
publisher, will see an opportunity to do the same thing with our
archives.  No, Lexis-Nexis is just a warehouse.  Valuable,
but not much added value.

Our friend Barbara Semonche, news researcher extraordinaire, makes the following post to the NewLib listserv:

“If our NewsLib subscribers
are interested in the fulltext of the Coleman and Wilkins research on
journalists' ethics (published in the Autumn 2004 issue of Journalism
& Mass Communication Quarterly) here is the direct

URL: http://www.aejmc.org/pubs/jmcqaut04/coleman.pdf



     “Makes for
rather provocative reading in some respects. An example: this research
mentions two variables — investigative reporting and civic journalism
— as having been linked to moral development in journalists in
qualitative work. The  researchers in their literature review
mention studies that have
shown investigative  reporters to make moral decisions regarding
wrongdoing then abandon objectivity to push for public good, serve as
moral judges, and deal with ethical issues more than other types of
reporters. Hmmmmmm.”

One
of the things we've learned in the past decade is that journalists and
police departments often are asking the same questions and use — or
could use — many of the same methods to analyze data.  In fact,
we would argue that crime analysts and criminologists are doing some of
the best work in the social sciences today. 

One of
the issues of import to both professions is racial profiling.  A
recent publication from the U.S. Dept. of Justice suggests some methods
for analyzing the that data.

A Suggested Approach to Analyzing Racial
Profiling: Sample Templates for Analyzing Car-Stop Data

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office
of Community Oriented Policing Services

A Suggested Approach to Analyzing Racial
Profiling: Sample Templates for Analyzing Car-Stop Data (PDF; 468 KB)

“Decisions regarding the merits of
racial profiling concerns are important and should not be based on either
anecdotal evidence or incomplete analysis. Evaluating the extent and nature of
police profiling patterns may lead to decisions regarding proper training and
appropriate police tactics. It is crucial that such evaluations rely on
appropriate methodological approaches, objectively obtained data, and
appropriate benchmarks or comparison guidelines.“

Newspapers may need to move back into the future to avoid extinction.

Kids dissing newspapers

One of the underlying — and motivating — assumptions here at the IAJ is that having good data is a prerequisite to
doing good analysis.  And the analytic journalist needs to know
first what data is available before any questions can be raised about
the quality and defintion of that data.  All this means we are
talking about transparency in government and, when possible, the
private sector.  (It also applies to transparency in
journalism.  More on that here and in days to come.)

On that site you will find:
“This Special Report on Public Sector Transparency illustrates current international trends in
advancing transparency through civil society, government and the media. Through extensive interviews
with leaders across a range of sectors as well as survey feedback from Development Gateway users, this Report
explores the practical issues of ensuring openness in governments around the world.”

In
the IAJ's on-going search for new methodologies, reinforcing lessons
often come through.  On Saturday, April 30, NPR's Scott Simon
taked with John Lentini about analyzing fires.  Lentini's comments
emphasize the need for questioning assumptions and pressing hard to
clarify definitions.



From NPR's “Weekend Edition Saturday:”

“John Lentini, an arson expert, tells Scott Simon about changes that have
brought into question many convictions based on outdated methods of
determining arson. One of this convictions resulted in the execution of
a Texas man in 2004.”  To listen, click here.

Derek
Willis — who might be considered an analytic journalist's analytic
journalist — reminded us today that there already is an abundance of
resources in every newsroom in the world.  The problem is,
journalists don't understand the concept of synergy, and that one piece
of your information and one piece of my information can total the three pieces required to produce an uncommonly good story.

See:
Derek Willis' The Scoop
http://www.thescoop.org/thefix/

http://www.sfexaminer.com
Today's SF Examiner has an innovative full-scale cheerlead for a
project with the potential to significantly impact San Francisco. The
Examiner swerves from the unusual placement of a front-page editorial,
to a news story with several relevant sidebars, to a columnist's
unusual  perspective, to an editorial appeal by the Mayor. Click
on the above link and then click on the link for today's newspaper.

The mission of the IAJ is to find better ways of doing
journalism.  That rarely means turning
to others practicing – and writing about how to practice — the same old
classic journalism.  Instead, we in the
profession must make a greater effort to seek other methods to know more about
a variety of phenomena.  All professions
and academic disciplines have journals and trade magazines.  These can go a long way to teaching how
those practitioners think and what they think about, along with the methods of
those disciplines.

Education is surely among the most data-rich of the
professions.  [The flock of newspapers
publishing scorecards of school performance and salaries is evidence of
how we can use this.]  And a good
many educational administrators spend a lot of time trying to figure out what
that data means.  Data
mining is one of their tools.

The current issue of Technology
& Learning carries the first of a two-part series on data mining in
education.  The story, of course, is
aimed at educators, so the enterprising journalist will have to do some
translation and seek opportunities for intellectual-technology transfer.  Be sure to read the sidebars.

Data: Maximize Your Mining

By Todd McIntire
 http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160400818