You’ve been in this situation before. The anniversary of an important local event approaches and you need coverage. Interviewing people on the street about an event that happened years ago doesn’t help unless they were there. We need concrete information to bring the facts to a story; we need historical, primary-source data.
The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., did this right in today’s text and multimedia package commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. You can listen to photojournalist Christopher Anderson explain the story behind the famous photo he took of the volcanic eruption on May 18, 1980. Go to another page, and you discover that he went back to the places he photographed to show us what those places look like now. A new photographer wouldn’t bring the same emotions to the page that juxtaposes the old and the new. Don’t tell us what’s changed; show us the visual data.
And because stories aren’t all about a newspaper’s history, there’s a reader memory page. You can read and listen to the stories of community members who were actually there then, and see their snapshots, which allow you to experience the story in a personal way.
Newspapers themselves serve as a valuable archive, and with the Internet, it’s easier than ever to use those resources wisely. It doesn’t matter if those resources are documents or veterans in our newsrooms. This is the second half of data journalism. While we can, and must, request data from outside sources, we can also delve for records of the past here in our buildings. We just have to make sure we capture them. There’s got to be a better way to organize our memories, sources, notes.
Preserving the data that is our newsrooms’ collective knowledge isn’t a new concern. In 2006, Derek Willis, who now works on data-driven Web applications at the New York Times, wrote, “We are losing something when people with decades of experience and knowledge head towards retirement or another job. The worst part? We’re losing much more than we have to lose, if only newspapers acted upon the principle that its information is as valuable as its people.”
Four years later, at the height of the information age, we’ve still got a long way to go in heeding that call.
