The Craft of Research

• Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to stimulus data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.
• With the NYCStat Stimulus Tracker, New Yorkers can track the City’s use of federal stimulus/recovery funds provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).
• Eye on the Stimulus is a project from the ProPublica public interest journalism site that may be of use to you.  It includes a state-by-state Recovery Tracker.

Yesterday, Michael Cohen profiled a Golden Gloves boxer for the Daily News.

And Andrea Swalec continues her productive ways at “The Local” for the New York Times with stories on the Green Apple Café and Kif.

Keep up the good work!

Today’s bonus: Have you checked out YourNabe.com for New York City neighborhood news?

Double bonus: If we’re lucky, maybe FOIA requests will be processed faster soon.

You will receive your second research grade of the semester on the enterprise story.  I will again operate as I did with the news feature. The first draft gets my advice on how to improve the story from a research perspective, and the final draft gets the grade. Same standards apply:

• You must do a clip search in Nexis and/or Factiva on at least one facet of the story. (More is better.)  Show me your search strategies and put citations on your research source list, not links to Nexis or Factiva search results.
• Your research source list must be annotated or footnoted in a way that makes it clear what information you used from the listed sources in your story.  Bare lists of links are not acceptable.

As I mentioned in class, if you want to do a “research-inspired” enterprise story, I’m willing to give you extra help on your pitch and throughout the writing process.  However, I ask that you read this first.  My tips for last semester’s research-inspired enterprise story will make it much clearer what I expect, and what pitfalls to avoid.

A few weeks ago, a college basketball coach was fired and went on a rant about the mid-season termination providing no benefit.  I had a hunch he was right and wanted to go about proving it in an article.

The first thing I did was contact Gary K. Johnson at the N.C.A.A.–the organization’s stats expert–who sent me a list of all the coaching changes over the last 15 years, including those that happened during the season.

Then I needed to find out the circumstances behind those changes.  I was only interested in the ones where coaches were fired, or effectively fired by being forced to resign.  So I did a Nexis search on every one and discovered that of the dozen coaches who had been dismissed during the season over the past six years, not one of the immediate replacements succeeded and got the job permanently at the end of the season.

So I compiled a chart and here was the end result.

God bless experts!  God bless Nexis!

When you list research sources at the end of your stories, I want something that shows me why you’re listing each source.  A bare list of links or citations does nothing for me.  I’m not going to read full reports or stories to try to figure out why you listed them.  You could handle this in one of two ways.  You could put numbered footnotes in the text of your stories if David and Rebecca will allow that, or if not, annotate your source lists to tell me what information you used in your story from each source.

Today’s bonus: Tinamarie Vella of our Research Center has a great post on useful resources from the Library of Congress web site.

From some of the research questions I’m getting, I’m starting to gather that many of you may not have gotten familiar enough with NYC.gov resources in Craft I.  Unfortunately, it’s not a scheduled lesson for Craft II, but I would highly suggest perusing the handout I posted in my NYC.gov lesson material last fall.  If you’re looking for some sort of New York City information or data, there’s a good chance it’s going to be somewhere on NYC.gov.  It’s not always easy to find, hence the handout which annotates direct links to a lot of the most useful databases and pages.

Please check it out!

My name is Jack Styczynski and this is my fourth semester teaching research in Craft classes–my second with Rebecca Leung and first with David Lewis.  If you’re interested in my professional background, click here.  Personally, I’m a big New Orleans Saints fan (WHO DAT!) and a huge college hoop-head.

The primary purpose of this blog is to give you online access to my lesson material from class.  But you’ll also want to check in frequently for posts on my most recent research discoveries, such as the All Things Census blog, Databases and E-Journals from the New York State Library and the Listorious directory of Twitter accounts.

You’ll also see me spreading the love for some of your latest published work, such as that by Liza Eckert and Andrea Swalec this month, and Vishal Persaud, Jordan Shakeshaft and Erica Soto in December.

Welcome back, and see you soon!

• Google is testing a news-by-topic service.
• ProPublica has an Eye on the Stimulus page which includes a recovery tracker to find stimulus projects near you.

David Montalvo wrote about a Catholic veterans group seeking new members for The Queens Courier.

Kerri MacDonald wrote a piece for “The Local” about a computer glitch that kept Maplewood residents from getting e-mails containing H1N1 vaccination information.

Today’s bonus: A great place to find zip codes for New York City neighborhoods.  Could come in handy when using ReferenceUSA or looking for Census Bureau stats, among other things.

On “The Local” blog for the New York Times, Kerri covered a debate over whether rooming houses should be allowed in South Orange.

Today’s bonus: In the spring, I mentioned that archives of several magazines are being hosted at Google Books.   Now I’ve found a complete list, including Life.