Pew Center/IRE Workshop, Atlanta

From March 10 – 12, 95 journalists met in Atlanta for “Counting, Caring & Connecting: Making Data Meaningful” – a workshop on how to make data in our stories come alive to readers and viewers. Some highlights:

Barbara Walsh
Reporter, Portland (ME) Press Herald on the details that make the data come alive: “I believe that when we write our stories we ought to write them with passion. You want people to laugh, or cry or squirm or say, “We ought to do something.’ “

Dennis Williard
Statehouse Bureau Chief, Akron Beacon Journal on reporting on school funding and charter schools: “What we learned was that people really expect a lot from schools. The list of extras that people wanted was not what legislators were talking about as they worked through the school funding problem … So we focused on the conflicts between the legislature and the stakeholders.

“We came away almost revitalized in our efforts. The community really wanted us to ask tougher questions. They were tired of legislative half-truths.”

Karen Weintraub
Reporter, The Virginian-Pilot on more effective framing: “The frame for this story on the disabled is not ‘How much the disabled are different from me’ but rather ‘How much they are like me.’ “

Susan Gage
Crime Team Leader, The Oregonian on making crime coverage more meaningful: “Readers want to know about the big picture, but they also want to know about the bicycle theft next door … We went from being a reactive team to being more enterprising.”

Chris Waddle
VP for News, The Anniston Star says the newsroom’s civic mapping work is turning up “people who don’t really have an axe to grind but they’re the real stuff. They don’t spin the story, they tell the story.”