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Visiting profs' vision: BU as analytic journalism hub

By David J. Craig

As municipal budgets, standardized public school test results, crime stats, and other public documents increasingly become available on the Internet, journalists have ready access to more information than ever before.

Tom Johnson Photo by Vernon Doucette

But are reporters prepared to understand and draw meaningful conclusions from the wealth of statistics online? Typically not, according to Steve Ross and Tom Johnson, visiting professors at the College of Communication, who for the past eight months have been developing the Institute for Analytic Journalism (IAJ). Partly because newsrooms are stingy when it comes to paying for training, they say, combing databases and interpreting figures are skills most newswriters have never fully developed.

However, beginning this September, Ross and Johnson intend to train journalists who can retrieve and interpret complicated data such as those in statistics sheets and other technical documents, and turn them into compelling stories. The University put up $250,000 this year to lay the groundwork for IAJ, enabling them to recruit students, raise funds, and teach at COM. They still must secure outside funding to launch the institute, which they plan to codirect.

"We want to try to develop in journalists new ways of understanding problems and a new vocabulary," says Johnson, a journalism professor at San Francisco State University. "We're not trying to replace anything. The great feature writer and the great columnist are always going to be necessary. But the information environment has changed to such a degree that the definition of journalism is expanding, and we need to expand with it."

The IAJ three-semester master's program, geared toward journalists with three to five years' work experience, would teach analytic tools rarely used in the newsroom. Students would take courses in statistics and social science research methodology, and learn to present information using charts, maps, and other graphics. Many courses in the program would be taught in conjunction with other BU schools and colleges.

More advanced courses would train students in general systems theory -- an analytic approach that considers the interconnectedness of systems and is used by many scientists and social scientists -- geographic information systems, and how to create interactive Web applications. These would allow readers to calculate, for instance, their next year's heating bill or property tax, based on personal information they input.

But what good is an academic concept like general systems theory to a reporter? It usually is used by scientists working in areas such as artificial intelligence and neural networks, to understand how feedback loops behave. Just imagine an online city budget story showing readers that by axing its school budget by any given amount, a community could expect that X number of young families would move out of the town, raising property taxes by Y amount over five years.

"That sort of thing was done by New York's Newsday on its Web site recently to explain the New York City budget," says Ross, who teaches computer-assisted reporting at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. "It seems to be done here and there for big stories or special features, but it hasn't been done frequently enough to change the newspaper profession. My point is that this is not just for big stories; it's for small stories too."

	Steve Ross Photo by Vernon Doucette

IAJ's curriculum also would bolster students' basic and reporting writing skills, Ross says. For instance, they would study simulation theory, a concept that explains when readers best identify with a protagonist. Concepts from other disciplines that would help them understand recurring themes in news stories would also be taught.

"A good example is the argument about whether all Massachusetts taxpayers should pay to clean up Boston Harbor, since it will directly benefit only people who live on the Harbor," says Ross. "That type of debate might be the subject of a semester-long course at the School of Public Health, but we could compress what aspects of it a journalist needs to know into a one-hour lecture, and then have students write some stories that involve those ideas."

The market for analytic journalists with such skills is growing rapidly, Ross says, particularly in magazine, newsletter, and online publishing. "The number of specialized trade magazines in the United States has grown tremendously in recent years, as has the number of newsletters published by trade associations and activist and consumer groups," he says. "Also, the highly specialized online magazines such as Pork 2002, which was a National Magazine Award-winner last year, and Farm Journal haven't really been harmed by the whole dot-com meltdown.

"The one common thread is that all those sorts of publications require people who are number-savvy," he continues, "so people with the skills that we will teach get snapped up. They have tools that virtually no one else has."

To learn more, visit www.bu.edu/iaj.

Cynthia K. Buccini contributed to this report.

15 February 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations