On Wednesday afternoon, we met with Steve Doig, a Pulitzer Prize winner who’s currently serving as the Knight Chair of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University.
Doig’s a pioneer in data journalism. He was the first staffer at the Miami Herald to take advantage of digital records in his reporting. When Hurricane Andrew roared through Florida, he and a team of reporters analyzed damage estimates and weather patterns to assess the initial reports. Then, when they began looking at property records and compared them with the storm’s path, they found a curious statistic: The newest homes in the area were the most likely to sustain major damage.
As he said, many of the newer neighborhoods resembled a lumber yard rather than a housing development.
Doig and his team dug deeper. They hired two outside firms to collect and individually enter $8 million worth of campaign contributions into a database. What they gleaned from that was that 25 percent of campaign contributions were coming from the building industry.
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