Data Journalism Archives | John Tedesco

Follow the money: Searchable payroll database of city employees posted online

John Tedesco — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:29:47 +0000

Reporter Greg Jefferson wrote a story in today’s paper that examined how taxpayer money is being spent on salaries and overtime for San Antonio’s 10,000 city employees. The story looks at the city’s highest-paid employees, and explains why $13 million in overtime went to the Fire Department and many of its dispatchers.

This information was gleaned from a payroll database at City Hall. Express-News Database Editor Kelly Guckian filed an open-records request, obtained the data from the city and analyzed it. And you can analyze the data yourself. Mike Howell, managing editor of the Express-News Web site, set up a user interface for our online readers. You can look up employees by name. Or simply hit “search” and the results will automatically show you the highest-paid employees.

Related: Telling stories with data: Police chases and drug smugglers on the Texas-Mexico border

The salaries range from $275,000 (City Manager Sheryl Sculley, who recently received a much-publicized raise, to $18,200 (an employee in the city’s Human Resources Department).

City Manager Sheryl Sculley

Other media organizations, believing the public has a right to know how tax money is spent, are publishing payroll data of government agencies. The nonprofit group Texas Watchdog recently posted data of state employees earning more than $100,000.

Readers have had mixed reactions. Not everyone believes the names and salaries of government employees should be made public, as some of the comments on this blog post by the Houston Chronicle show. One reader wrote: “I wholeheartedly agree that this is public information, but that doesn’t mean it has to be broadcast without context.”

I think the key question is whether the database helps readers learn something about the way their government works.

Examining how tax money is spent is a legitimate news story. And if that’s the case, why shouldn’t readers be able to look at the data themselves and crunch the numbers? In the Internet age, shouldn’t newspapers make this information publicly available to everyone, instead of keeping it to themselves?

A ranking of the highest-paid officials might show us the priorities — and possible excesses — of a government agency. And in a city where police and firefighters constantly complain about being understaffed, it’s revealing to see a few public-safety employees earning nearly $80,000 in overtime in 2007. Are those dispatchers overworked?

If publishing this data gives readers a tool to ask those kinds of meaningful questions, that’s a good thing.

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Mapping fire response times in San Antonio’s outer neighborhoods

John Tedesco — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:50:06 +0000

I made a quick Google map of the data we analyzed for this story about fire response times in San Antonio. Many residents of the exclusive Dominion, home of the San Antonio Spurs’ David Robinson and other celebrities, aren’t happy about a slow response to a recent fire that destroyed a $1 million home.

View Larger Map

I plugged in the city’s data for incidents that occurred between 2000 and 2006 in the area in and around the Dominion. The red dots show incidents in which firefighters exceeded a national response standard of five minutes. The clock starts when they’re dispatched to the emergency, and it ends when the first unit arrives at the scene.

Clearly, firefighters aren’t making many fires in time. This was a problem we found in many outlying neighborhoods, where fire stations are more spread out, and a labyrinth of winding, cul-de-sac streets slow down firefighters.

What’s also interesting about this map is how few fires strike the Dominion, which raises questions about where the Fire Department should marshal its assets and best protect its residents.

Here’s a map of Sunrise, a neighborhood on the East Side of San Antonio that suffered the same delays:

View Larger Map

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Fire response times: Using public data to uncover hidden stories

John Tedesco — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:23:27 +0000

After retired state Sen. Frank Madla and members of his family died in a fire in November 2006, the tragedy raised an obvious question: Are San Antonio firefighters doing a good job arriving to fires quickly and keeping residents safe? Express-News Projects Editor David Sheppard asked us to find out.

At this point, what would you do to get the story? Maybe call the Fire Department and ask them for quotes and statistics? Talk to homeowners to get anecdotal evidence?

Related: Telling stories with data: Police chases and drug smugglers on the Texas-Mexico border

In the old days, those were the methods journalists were stuck with. We wouldn’t be able to write anything beyond a superficial story. We wouldn’t truly understand the scope of the problem.

Data journalism

The rise of the computer age has helped reporters take the initiative to do their own analysis of public records. Journalists are analyzing government data to come up with their own findings and discoveries. It takes time and patience. But these new reporting techniques are uncovering compelling stories that are a public service and can’t be found anywhere else.

For the fire story, we asked the city for a copy of its entire database of incidents documenting responses to structure fires in San Antonio. The database showed the location of each fire and how long it took firefighters to arrive.

With the help of Express-News Database Researcher Kelly Guckian, we plugged the incidents and response times into a citywide map. Here’s part of the story I wrote with Guckian and Reporter Karisa King:

City records show the Fire Department’s mission of protecting lives and property is clashing with San Antonio’s appetite for new land.

In the past six years, firefighters rushed to inner-city blazes far more quickly than to fires in popular outlying areas that attract thousands of new homeowners.

Delays on the city’s edges plague rich and poor alike, from the exclusive enclave of the Dominion to low-income neighborhoods like Sunrise, a struggling community on the far East Side.

San Antonio annexed many of these neighborhoods despite protests by residents, who complained the city would fail to provide swift fire protection.

The city’s own records reveal that most of the time, those fears came true.

A powerful tool

The analysis of the data took the story in whole new directions. When we sat down with fire officials to interview them, we didn’t have to start out by asking, Is there a problem with response times in San Antonio?

We already knew there was a problem. We showed them copies of our maps, told them what we found out from their database, and asked them, Why are firefighters taking so long to reach fires on the outskirts of the city? It changed the entire dynamic of the interview.

Many newspaper critics complain that reporters don’t simply “report the facts.” Maybe these critics would have a problem with journalists taking the initiative to conduct their own analysis of public data.

I would counter that our job is to tell readers what’s really going on. And by making sense of public data and asking our own questions, we are finding stories that help readers make sense of a complicated world.

At a time when newspapers are struggling, these kinds of public-service stories might save them.

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