Tip Sheet: Ryan Thornburg

Assistant Professor
“Element”-ary University of North Carolina
ryan.thornburg@unc.edu
Beat Reporting
On every beat, there are entities — “things” — that a reporter covers. And each of those things have
specific attributes. By thinking about their beats as a world of entities and attributes, journalists can invent
new ways of re-using the information they uncover and new ways of delivering the right information to the
right people at the right time. Here are some tips to get story-centric reporters into a data-centric mindset.

Step 1: Gather the Data

Option 1. Reporter Observation. Some examples ...
a. number and gender of people walking into a new museum
b. number of lumens put out by street lamps in a high-crime section of town
c. responses you receive to a telephone poll question.
Option 2. Importing from existing digital files of fielded data. Some examples ...
a. NICARs Database Library at http://data.nicar.org/node/7
b. Data.gov
Option 3. Submissions from site visitors. Good technique when ...
a. amount of information you want to collect is large or rapidly changing
b. no expertise is required to collect the data
c. data you’re collecting isn’t information about which people are likely to lie
Option 4. “Scraping” the unstructured text of a Web page or other document
a. Look for patterns in the text
b. Screen-Scraper.com: http://www.screen-scraper.com/media/video/video_tour.php

Step 2: Organize information to illuminate trends, outliers

1. What exactly are you trying to measure?
a. Questions that begin with “who, what, when, where and how much.”
2. Do you have the data you need? Is it structured so you can see news value?
a. Do you have the data entities and elements?
b. Have you converted any qualitative data into quantitative data?
c. Is your data accurate? Does it make sense?
d. Is the data free of redundancies?

Step 3: Publish the data online

1. What questions will people use the data to answer?
2. Create search forms, maps, timelines and other charts to help people answer those
questions

This tip sheet comes from Chapter 9 of Ryan Thornburg’s book Producing Online News, published by
CQPress. For more examples, exercises, ideas and case studies buy the book and subscribe to the related
online module at http://www.cqpress.com.