For the past six weeks my classmates and I have been working to complete a six part Massive Open Online Course on data visualization and data journalism through the University of Texas. It was a worthwhile experiment that provided us with the necessary knowledge to take on a data based journalism project despite being a group with next to no data journalism experience. If you're curious about what I learned and what I contributed to the course, click here.
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Our capstone class has picked a topic. Huzzah! Now that we have a focused question we all have subsets of the question we will explore. In order to focus our reporting we're using the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's project proposal template to prepare ourselves.
Project summary The central question of my project is where do people live 50 years after the fair housing marches? It will also look at housing patterns in the city and Greater Milwaukee area. The story will be presented with a print story and a video, along with a collection of data. What is the key question we are trying to answer? Where do people live 50 years later? Why are we doing this story now? In 1967 the fair housing marches of Milwaukee occurred during a period of widespread civil disobedience. Now, 50 years later during another wave of protest, we will report on how the things people marched for have changed in the 50-year period since they marched. Our audience will largely be those participating in this summer’s “200 Nights of Freedom” marches and the people of Milwaukee who will hear about the marches throughout the year and have any number of questions about them. Background One thing I do know is there will be movement to report on. In the time of the marches the south side was a predominantly white area, but that area is now largely Hispanic, a demographic that didn’t rule any sizeable portion of Milwaukee in 1967. Though Milwaukee is still extremely segregated it’s segregated in a much different way than it was in 1967. Reporting strategy This is a data driven story but the print story will be written as a feature, accompanied by a larger data element. The subjects will be residents of Milwaukee who, ideally, have lived in the area for the last 50 years. It would be beneficial to speak to members of the march to get their perspective on how things have changed, why they live where they live now and how they got there. I expect it won’t be terribly difficult to find cooperative subjects for this story. The minimum story here is about one or two families who live in different areas of Milwaukee than they might have lived in the 1960s. The maximum story would tell the story of many families of many different backgrounds who have moved around the city for the past 50 years, exploring each step of their local migration. This route would tell the story of a white family who moved from the south side, a Hispanic family who moved in to the south side early, a black family in an affluent area who has been around Milwaukee since the marches, another black family who has moved through primarily black neighborhoods as those areas have shifted and perhaps an Asian family as well. The two main questions for all these people would be why do you live here right now and how did you get here? Timeframe The reporting for this story will need to be finished in roughly two months, with the data visualization element, the video and the print story coming together in early May. Presentation opportunities When my story, along with the video and potential audio element, are complete they will be a part of the larger story we construct on an independent site. The data visualization will be a part of a comprehensive visualization connected with the other six stories my classmates are working on. Teammate Julie Grace summed it up well in her blog post by saying, “Together, we will create a data visualization piece that showcases the changes in housing in Milwaukee from 1967 to 2017.” Dang, I feel much better about this project today than I did at this time last week. Last Wednesday Joseph Yeado of the Public Policy Forum visited our capstone class. He provided crucial information we needed in our search for reliable data.
One narrative we may pursue is how unemployment has changed for colored people in Milwaukee since the 1960’s. Yeado recommended we look to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for necessary statistics. Along those same lines we want to examine high school dropout rates and how they’ve evolved in the same time period, he suggested we look at the City of Milwaukee’s Department of Public Instruction for that data. We discussed how we could turn the points on this 1963 document from the Wisconsin NAACP into data based stories. A major concern I had was whether or not we would be able to find the requisite data for these stories. Fortunately, Yeado assured us we could get the information we needed. Throughout the class we discussed how we could rival ONA Award winning projects of past years. A project I wanted the class to see was a student only project by a group from TCU. The story is about border communities in southern Texas dubbed “colonias.” The project is well done and follows a clear question. It has relevant photos, videos and text, but it does not have the data element we seek to add. Regardless, this is the level of project we will be competing against. If we can focus our question and pick great stories, we can create a project just like this, at a much higher quality and add data visualization. The shooting in the videos was fine, but not only can we shoot better, we can shoot with better equipment. We can frame the shots better and we can edit tighter and write more succinct broadcast copy. If we focus this story, we can make something great. Right now my biggest concern is for our group to pick a focused question and drive our project in a clear direction. When we truly know what we’re doing I’m sure I’ll feel differently about the project. For now, I’m uneasy. |
AboutOn this page you can find blog posts about my adventures in journalism, ponderings about projects, experiences with storytelling tools and updates on what I'm working on. Archives
February 2017
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