Information Society

The nation watched as civil unrest over took Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody in April. News outlets scrambled to cover the events that took place. But the Baltimore Sun was ahead of the game, thanks to its data desk.

The staff was already collecting data on police brutality and police militarization, according to Patrick Maynard, newsroom data developer at the Sun. Another Sun employee had been working on follow-up data from a previous story about police brutality including requests for medical rejections during the jail intake process at central booking.

“We were able to fairly quickly update that data for a look at how many other people showed up at the jail in an injured or otherwise unhealthy state,” Maynard said.

Many of the documents the Sun used in their data coverage of the protests came from publicly available sources that the Sun staff had been requesting on their down-time.

“It’s good to have a bunch of document requests floating around out there at any given time since you never know which data sets will be handy when a news hook pops up,” said Maynard. “Try to get as much information as you can on any large organizations in your area. Sometimes that's a set of spreadsheets, sometimes that's an email archive, and sometimes it's something entirely different.”

Maynard said that everyone, from Sun reporters and editors to page designers, is requesting public information forms at any given time because they never know when that data will be needed. Additionally, all of the newsroom producers, designers and developers are partially cross-trained in reporting, print graphics, general app development and visualization.

“While that might seem like a distraction at a glance for someone accustomed to a larger team, the nature of reusable, open-source code actually means that by being cross-trained, each team member was able to take an idea and very quickly execute it, without having to wait on too many other people,” Maynard said.

In addition to having collected data from documents, the Sun was equipped to showcase the information through a pre-existing Web page that focused on data for stories, interactive and special presentations (baltimoresun.com/news/data). The Sun included timelines that helped condense material, photos, maps that included comments from readers and helped people get a sense of where things were happening on the streets.

“Every form of presentation has a role. A lot of our best presentations that aren't long-form stories link out liberally to their long-form counterparts, video clips,” Maynard said.

Moving forward, Maynard said data journalism is an important tool for young journalists and newsrooms to have. “Your newsroom team is not too small to do this kind of stuff on deadline, but they have to care about both investigative data and presentation enough to read up a bit ahead of time.”