Database journalism isn’t simply about finding data, it’s about finding a story within the data. A great example of that principle is the work that reporters from the Las Vegas Sun did when they wanted to examine what was right and what was wrong about their local health care delivery system. Marshall Allen and Alex Richards were named finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for their series, called “Do No Harm.”
In an interview with Poynter.org this week, Allen described the two years of work that went into the project. “The biggest challenge with data is to make it meaningful to people. It can be really complicated and obscure sounding stuff if you just show charts and graphs.”
The 2.9 million public documents that [Allen and Richards] examined and hundreds of interviews that they conducted exposed thousands of preventable medical mistakes in Las Vegas hospitals. The Nevada legislature responded with six pieces of legislation that are still up for debate… When they sent the data back to the authorities, it built credibility because hospitals and regulators started to understand The Sun was serious about getting the story right, Allen said.
The project would have been easier and faster to complete if it had been based on what Allen calls “sobbing anecdotal evidence.”
But “the hospitals would have dismissed the sob stories,” he said. “We knew this would be very controversial for the hospitals — we found a method to impose transparency on them. We had to show the data and show the documents as best we could.”
The Sun team wanted to make the data local and personal to every reader.
They posted mountains of original public documents online, which allows readers to see for themselves how the journalists know what they know. By using DocumentCloud, the reporters could highlight and annotate the documents to help readers see what was important and learn a document’s back story.
Readers responded. “We know that there were tens of thousands of page views on those documents,” Allen says.
