Data hunt

Due date: Sunday, April 26.

As you move through the semester, think about stories that you’d like to do in the future. This assignment gives you a chance to do early prospecting on a story – a luxury you won’t often have in a newsroom. Run the story idea by me before you get too far along either in person or in an email / Slack message.

You may want to review the tutorial on finding data sources for ideas on how to find datasets. The approach we will use is one that many reporters use when they start on longer term projects: reporting from the outside in

You’ll turn in your story idea and three possible public records sources that you would use or combine in order to document the story.

I expect this to be a one-page document that lays out

1. A story idea.
2. A source of records – not statistics – that you might use to document the story. This can be either a set of records that are readily available on the Internet, something you can just call and get from an official, or something you might have to file a public records request for. Either way, it should include the name of the database, the agency that is responsible for it, and a plan for how you would obtain it. You should have researched the public records law enough to know what might be possible to obtain if you were to file a request, even if you get the data from the Internet.
3. A preliminary plan for what you will use the database for. For example, if you want to get every court record of an eviction filing, you should know enough about the dataset to know what you can, and can’t do with it.