Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

In the midst of a headlong rush to develop slick new journalism tools, maybe we need to take a step back once and a while.

Don’t get me wrong. I think coming up with new ways to do journalism - especially environmental journalism - is an exciting challenge. But it makes some sense to spend some time applying the new stuff that gets invented instead of always looking for the next breakthrough.

MAPLight and the Open Secrets offer tools that are great for peering into the murky waters of federal campaign contributions. Both are great advances in government transparency.

If there is a knock against them, I’d have to say it lies in the overwhelming amount of data that they collect and make publicly available. Taking it all in is not unlike drinking from a firehose. But they’re powerful and exciting tools. And now that some smart visionaries developed them, perhaps the task of reducing that torrent of information to a manageable stream should fall to some of the rest of us.

At the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism we tried to do that recently with our Great Lakes Echo environmental news service.  Echo reporter Andrew Norman, fresh off an internship at Congressional Quarterly, took a small slice of all that data to deliver a focused news story.

He examined Congressional campaign contributions in relationship to a key climate change vote. He targeted just representatives of the eight states that Echo covers. It was a single issue with a geographic focus.

And it took the new media tools developed by MapLight and CRP and APPLIED them.

Check out the story and see what you think. It shows that House members from those states on average got significantly more campaign cash than the national average from advocates of the climate change bill. This has much more to do with the 125 Great Lakes representatives’ memberships and chairmanships in key committees than it does with proximity to fresh water.

That’s interesting stuff. It took a little while to figure out how to get there. But with practice, I’m betting we’ll get better, faster and find even more significant stories.

The best part is that Andrew didn’t have to invent new media tools to do it. He just had to be savvy enough to apply those developed by others.

And that, I would argue, has to be at least as significant as creating them in the first place.