Paper Route: Finding My Way to Precision Journalism

"One way we can comprehend how news markets change is by following one individual. This autobiography traces the career of Phil Meyer, a reporter who helped bring the methods of social science into reporting through what he termed ‘precision journalism.’ When Meyer—as a reporter covering Capitol Hill for the Akron Beacon Journal —found it hard to gain the attention of sources in DC, he decided to dive into documents as a way to generate original stories. After learning how to use computers and survey research during a Niemen Fellowship at Harvard , he led a survey of Detroit in 1967, which helped win a Pulitzer for its exploration of the causes of a riot. That led him to think about how you could use the methods of social science, data collection, falsification, and apply it to journalism. As an academic, he trained a number of journalists. Later on, reporters and editors created an award in his honor. The Philip Meyer Award is given each year to the best work that uses the tools of social science to do investigative reporting. Data journalism and storytelling are intertwined. You have to reach before you teach. Data make it possible for you to tell a different type of story. In my book, Democracy’s Detectives, I profile the career of Pat Stith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. He started reporting in the mid-1960s, doing a story about the poor water quality in an African-American neighborhood of about one hundred and twenty homes by knocking on doors. In the 1970s, he wrote about a polluted river by walking an 18-mile stretch of the river and recording when he saw factories polluting through drainage pipes. By the 1990s he could use data collected by the state government and the EPA to write a story about hog farming’s impact on water quality in North Carolina. Eventually he wrote stories about water quality in wells across the state, stories which were made possible by the collection of data by government and by the drop in the price of computing power. So data can help you tell different stories."