Data reporting is deeply rooted in investigative journalism and isn’t simply statistics; it’s investigating the way a system works compared to how it’s supposed to work, a New York Times editor said Monday.
Sarah Cohen, editor of The New York Times’ computer-assisted reporting team, spoke to an audience at the Walter Cronkite School about misconceptions surrounding data reporting and what exactly goes into it as part of the school’s Must See Mondays speaker series.
“The challenge is to document what’s supposed to happen,” Cohen said. “Figuring out what’s supposed to happen really isn’t easy, and measuring what really does happen can be even harder.”
Cohen finds data in the lab, then goes out into the field and checks what she found in the lab, then brings back information. She said if a data reporter doesn’t go out into the field and report, they are only doing a third of their job.
“I have to go out and see if a three-dimensional world looks the same as a two-dimensional world looks,” Cohen said.
Data reporters and street reporters often clash, Cohen said. Street reporters look for a character and write an anecdote about the character, whereas data reporters look beyond that anecdote.
Cohen doesn’t quote statistics. She explained that she preferred to investigate and figure out her own numbers and figures instead of a public relations person or a government official giving her inaccurate information for the specific story she’s researching.
Data reporting is truly an investigation, Cohen said.
She said she liked to work from the “bottom up, not top down.” Statistics represent people and with those numbers come real-world examples, Cohen said.
“That’s why I get frustrated if I have to start with data, and then move down and try to find examples,” Cohen said. “That’s why I spend so much time on public records fights because I want to see every single case and I want to count it up.”
Knowing how to learn new things was a big part of what made Cohen successful, she said.
“The confidence to say that there is something out there that will answer this question and I can figure it out if I need to, is the thing that you get from school,” Cohen said.
Cohen explained that investigative reporting is all about how a reporter finds the story — and that’s with data.
Good beat reporting turns into investigative reporting, Cohen said.
“For us it’s the thrill of discovery,” said Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Cronkite School.
Liz Nichols, a senior economics and journalism student at ASU, worked in a corporate environment over the summer and related to Cohen about sifting through “fluff metrics” that public relations professionals would send her.
“You always have to go back to the data,” Nichols said. “It’s more about teaching yourself the math skills and the quantitative reasoning than anything.”
Contact the reporter at ellenpierce@asu.edu.
