Inside the Newsroom

Journalists find stories in all sorts of places. I have spent much of my journalism career, both in newsrooms and classrooms, finding stories in data.

That’s how I found myself crunching data for California Watch, a nonprofit investigative news operation that is part of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Reporters Lance Williams and Christina Jewett have spent more than a year investigating the billing practices of Prime Healthcare Services. I was drafted to analyze millions of rows of Medicare patient data to look for patterns and trends that might emerge.

In the fall of 2010, I was living in Lisbon on a four-month Fulbright professorship, lecturing to students and journalism professionals all over Portugal. One day, I got an e-mail from Mark Katches, the editorial director of California Watch, asking if I could be persuaded to help the reporters with the Prime investigation and a couple of other investigative projects.

Mark and I had known each other since our days on the board of directors of the Investigative Reporters & Editors organization. He knew I had done some heavy-lifting data projects during my 20 years with The Miami Herald, before I started teaching at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in 1996. And I certainly respected his stellar track record as the leader of numerous prize-winning newspaper investigative projects before he joined California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting...

In an age of aggregators, the Center for Investigative Reporting is a multimedia content creator. We invest our resources in covering underreported stories that traditional media can no longer afford to pursue.

While newspapers have continued to shrink, CIR’s staff has more than quadrupled since 2008, from seven to 32 people. Our highly skilled journalists have expertise that is increasingly rare in budget-strapped newsrooms. They cultivate deep sources, find hidden documents, make sense of complicated issues and develop this information into compelling stories delivered to the outlets you rely on for news.

Our data and digital teams plumb this research and create sophisticated data visualizations, interactive maps and tools that help you understand issues from the macro to the micro level. Our radio, video and digital producers work with our reporters to create engaging documentaries, web videos and even animations that demystify complex topics. Our distribution staff places the work and promotes it across hundreds of outlets. Our community engagement and social media team then works to actively engage the public and make sure our reporting gets to those most affected by it...

In “On edge of paradise, Coachella workers live in grim conditions,” California Watch contributor Patricia Leigh Brown details the hardships of Eastern Coachella Valley mobile home residents. Trailers are in shambles, parks unkempt. Water is contaminated with arsenic. Basic human needs – reliable electricity, sanitary conditions, clean air – too often go unmet.

On Tuesday night, a few dozen people joined me at the Mecca Library for a conversation on solutions and a screening of an original California Watch video about the issue.

Those who filled the room were strikingly diverse. There was Ana Sánchez, who had candidly discussed her living situation in our video and now sat alongside her family. Across from her, mobile home park owners prepared their case; they have done all they can, they said, to improve conditions at their parks but struggle in the face of county regulations, broken promises and lack of funds. Stakeholders continued to pour in: community organizer Sergio Carranza, representatives from California Rural Legal Assistance and a senior adviser to U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer among them.

We began with a screening of the original video by Carrie Ching, senior multimedia producer for the Center for Investigative Reporting. Then, over coffee and pan dulce, we began to...

How would you change marijuana laws? 

That is a question the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED posed to readers following the Obama administration’s letter to U.S. attorneys reminding them that the cultivation and distribution of marijuana is illegal under federal law. The answers we received were thoughtful and thought-provoking, but we struggled with the best way to present them. Then our partners at the Public Insight Network announced they’d created Skyline, an interactive visualization of responses from sources in the network, and were looking for a way to unveil it. I jumped at the opportunity.

To properly explain what Skyline is and why it is so cool, I asked its creator, Barrett Fox, to share a few words with you. Fox is a data visualization designer at American Public Media working on the Public Insight Network. He has worked throughout his career at the odd but thrilling intersection of video games, animation and information visualization...