Imagine you are an average metro reporter trying to write a story about a migration pattern you see taking place in your community.  In the past few years, you’ve noticed that older people tend to be moving into your community, which was once a suburb populated mostly by middle-aged adults and their families. 

You talk to senior citizens who’ve moved in.  You talk to a local agency that gives you some figures estimating an increase in retirees over the past few years.  You write your story.  It’s a story that impacts your community – your readers learn that the community has become more attractive to senior citizens.  You quote seniors, city officials and other residents who muse about the reasons why. 

Now imagine you had access to a nationwide database with interesting facts and figures about other cities — a database run and populated by working reporters in newsrooms throughout the country.  The database includes, all in one place, information that can be derived from a public report or document, like a budget or Census data, as well as other, more esoteric data which requires actual reporting to obtain, like combing the phonebook for grocery stores and driving through town to verify the existence of listed and unlisted establishments.  You enter the database and filter the data to include information about suburban areas with characteristics similar to yours. 

You find that, in comparison, your suburb has more community centers dedicated to senior citizens, more public transportation accessible to disabled individuals, and more nursing homes than most suburbs.   Data from the American Community Survey, displayed in a simple manner within the database, tells you that your town also has an unusual amount of grandparents living with and responsible for their grandchildren. 

You filter the data even further to include only the cities from which your sources have moved.  You find that, compared with those cities, the budget in your community dedicates more money to services for senior citizens and less for childcare and afterschool programs. 

You compare what you’ve learned from the database with what your sources have said.  You probably draw the same conclusions you would have drawn without the help of the database, but you have actual numbers provided by real reporters from other communities to back up your conclusions.  Since every single data point contained within the database is individually sourced, you call the reporters who contributed some of the information that caught your eye, to get their perspective and learn more about how they gathered the data.

You write your story.  It’s a story that impacts your community and the other communities to which you’ve compared.  It’s a story that tells a broader picture. 

The database isn’t a perfect science.  It contains information provided by other reporters and news organizations.  Some data may be subjective.  It is a supplement to your own reporting.  It is essentially what you would have learned if you’d traveled to the other locations yourself.  Instead, you were able to write your story on a tight deadline. 

If your deadline is not so tight and your news organization is willing to send you out of town, you could use the database simply to identify the places you want to compare.  If you’re looking for story ideas, looking through the database could be a starting point.  Either way, the database is a tool that you would otherwise not have had.  It is a tool to independently verify what you hear from your sources.

As part of the 2009 News21 project, I proposed to create a national database of local information designed for use by reporters.  This is not an interactive tool for readers.  This is not a fancy widget that tasks readers to “interactively” figure out what the story is.  This is a tool for reporters to get the kind of information that reporters like to use, the kind of information that helps construct a story.

In my original proposal, News21 fellows at each of the incubator schools would populate the database with information about communities near their location.  This was proposed as an option for fulfilling the national element required as part of the News21 project.  With little input or interest from the other News21 incubators, we at Berkeley have decided to move forward with the project with a Bay Area focus.  The site will launch with data on the 65 Bay Area cities with populations over 20,000.  

Ideally, the project will at some point expand nationally as we reach out to reporters in other parts of the country to encourage their participation in the database.   Any participating news organization or reporter, once providing data on their location, would have full, free access to the database. 

What things do you wish you knew about your city, or other cities like yours, but have never had the time or resources to find out?  What information could assist you in writing better stories about the demographics of your community?