Research is a vital part of Appen Media reporting.
Most of the stories from our newsroom are not just regurgitations of press releases and conferences. When covering city council meetings, Appen reporters parse through agenda packets that can number hundreds of pages. While writing about the sale of a commercial office building, staff may pull vacancy data from the Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Most of these documents are not directly cited. They serve to inform our reporters about the topic at hand or to fact check a quote. A 500-word story may be built upon hundreds of pages of text or thousands of datapoints in a spreadsheet.
Smart newsrooms expect only a short window of attention from readers. Successful ones make it count. It’s our job to distill volumes of information and present to you a summary of the most important morsels.
During that process, reporters gather a lot of documents, and most don’t see the light of day. I’m interested in changing that percentage.
Making source material more accessible to readers serves a few purposes.
It reinforces trust with our audience by backing up reporting. That one is the classic “cite your sources” motivation.
It encourages a more informed public. During a city budgeting process, reporters sift through audits and expenditures and revenue reports. They’ll take the hundred-page budget document and bring you an answer to the most important question: “Will this mean more or less turkey for me?”
Some residents may want to dive further, investigating for themselves why a deficit in the parks department appeared this year, or how many transportation projects went in the red. Making the underlying budget document more accessible, as reporters bubble up the topline information into the story, would make that exploration easier.
Should the cities themselves do a better job of sharing those documents? Of course. I just wouldn’t hold your breath or bet next year’s tax bill on it.
There’s a third, less obvious purpose that I think about often. Sometimes our newsroom is simply the only place where all these documents exist in the same place.
As an example, I keep a spreadsheet of electronic surveillance technology used by our cities. The list includes everything from license plate readers and facial recognition software to fiber-optic cabling and Bluetooth beacons. I can see which Metro Atlanta cities are tracking residents at community events and the vendors they use to do it. I’ve assembled the document over years and supported each detail with records, meeting minutes, marketing materials and other sources.
I don’t seek out the data. I just flag relevant documents when I see them coming through our newsroom during the regular course of business and file it away.
The surveillance tech is a heavy example of the third purpose. There are many others with perhaps brighter undertones.
Simply put, I think we come across a lot of useful information that doesn’t always make it to your eyes.
I want to share more of it with you.
We can do a better job of pointing you toward public information cited in our stories. That one is easy.
I want to hear what other kinds of documents we should make available.
If a reporter cites census data in a story about your city council approving a senior living facility, should we include a link to the population figures? Or would you prefer we keep highlighting only the most important and relevant data?
Imagine there was a data tab on appenmedia.com. Would you want us to share raw figures, or only the ones we’ve analyzed and contextualized?
Folks in the Appen Media newsroom are great at taking mundane materials, trimming the fat and serving you a nutrient-dense bite of your local government’s most important actions. My question is whether you’d also be interested in a side of burnt ends.
Email thoughts, questions and requests to carl@appenmedia.com. We can cook a little more if you’ve got the appetite.
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