How ACBJ uses data to tell stories across its 40-plus markets

Jon Wile, who joined the company in 2012 from the Washington Post, oversees the design of American City Business Journals products and works with the 43 individual business journal markets to support high standards of execution against those designs across all platforms.

He also trains local markets on storytelling, design standards, workflow processes/efficiencies, hiring and staff structure.

Wile also worked as a designer at the Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is a Kent State University graduate.

Wile spoke with Talking Biz News by email about a recent national project by American City Business Journals in which all of its papers published stories and data about how much workers make across the country and compares salaries across markets.

What follows is an edited transcript about that project and how ACBJ uses data to tell stories.

How did the project come about?

Emory Thomas, former chief content officer, led a charge earlier this year to put together a national cover story that could be localized by our markets, which is something ACBJ hasn’t done before. The initial idea was called the ACBJ Paycheck Report, which would tackle personal income by geography and profession – a topic that ACBJ readers repeatedly show they’re deeply interested in. The three-part project had installments that would be published in September, October and November.

Emory summarized the projects very well in a late July email to our group:

• What People Earn: A deep and broad revelation of the paychecks earned for virtually every job in every major U.S. city. In this report, you’ll learn what professions are growing the fastest in pay, and where your city lags versus its peers or the national average, for almost any profession.
• How Far Your Money Goes: How far does the average paycheck in Boston go when compared to, say, Birmingham? This report will reveal the value of every U.S. job in real dollars — since what your dollar buys is, in most ways, more important than how many dollars you have.
• Where the Money Lives: In this geographically dense report, you’ll learn where the big earners live in the U.S. and how wealth is distributed, city by city, zip code by zip code.

Ben Eubanks, Ed Stych and myself were the lead national editors on the project, which took about nine months from initial conversations to final publication.

Where did the data come from, and how was ACBJ able to crunch the data for each of its markets? 

The data came from the usual places you find public data — U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Scott Thomas, ACBJ’s data guru who works at Buffalo Business First, organized, evaluated and crunched the data into digestible chunks. He offered national trends, story ideas and interesting facts that could be localized. We held webinars with editors to explain how to sort through the data to find local stories/trends that affect their communities.

I’ve seen other ACBJ projects like this. How often does the company do data projects? 

We believe this is the first national cover story ACBJ has had all markets participate in during the same publishing window. We’ve had other joint projects but none that got all 43 markets rowing in the same direction.

What is the general reader reaction? 

Reader reaction has been quite strong according to our web metrics and social reaction. We’ve gotten about 4 million page views from the three packages and seen some very strong engagement metrics in our most recent batch of interactive maps that depict affluence at the zip code level.

Tell me about the logistics of getting stories written across 40-plus markets using such data. 

It was not easy. Ben, Scott, Ed, Dirk DeYoung (Minneapolis), Rob Daumeyer (Cincinnati) and myself did conference calls to discuss the data before releasing it to the individual markets. We tried to come up with possible story ideas or trends that markets could focus on so that the data sets wouldn’t overwhelm local editors.

Scott did a great job explaining the individual data sets on webinars, oftentimes going column by column through the documents to help editors understand what they were looking at. From there we let the local markets decide what they wanted to focus on. The only requirement besides running the content was localizing it.

Do subscribers ask for the raw data to use themselves? 

I don’t believe we’ve gotten any requests for this yet, but most of it is available online in our interactive charts.

What is the overall ACBJ strategy for why these data projects are important? 

These projects are vital to our company’s journalism. It’s our job as story-tellers to explain what’s happening in our communities in a way that people can understand and take action against. The primary dataset for What People Earn had 44,000 rows in it; it’s not our job to collect that data and say “here ya go, figure it out.”

It’s our job to mine the stories out of that data and tell our readers what it means so they can do something actionable with the business intelligence. We need to do more work that uses data as the primary backbone in our reporting, especially since we have so much technology that can help us tell these stories. Of course, this is easier said than done.

Do you find yourself constantly looking for data like this to turn into journalism? 

I would say we are selectively looking for opportunities to do impactful stories or projects around data, rather than constantly looking for them. ACBJ continues to grow in its telling of stories around data, and that will get stronger again in 2016.

The one thing I caution our markets about is the misuse of data, especially when it comes to visualizing data. Reporting and writing are not easy skills to master; the same thing is true with data analysis and visualization. The tools and technology have made data story-telling much easier, but it still requires an editor to ask the question “What story are we trying to tell with this data?” That always has to be our true north when doing data projects.

What’s the process like for turning the data into charts and graphics that readers can understand? 

This is where ACBJ is very lucky because we can call on our stable of star design talent. In this case, it was Matt Petty of the San Francisco Business Times and Jamey Fry of the Washington Business Journal. We hired illustrator Lucie Rice to design illustrations for print and branding that we could use across all platforms. Matt, Jamey and myself brainstormed how the data could be represented in print, then Bryan Skelton and myself worked on the digital interactives/charts.

Regardless of the platform or the team we kept coming back to the question of “What story are we trying to tell?” Jamey and Matt did a wonderful job of editing the data down for print, creating graphic shells/templates for markets to localize in their paper. This made those giant spreadsheets of data much easier to localize.

Is most of that work done at ACBJ and then sent out, or is it done at the individual papers? 

For digital charting and interactives, all the work was done in Charlotte and distributed to each market. For print, each market was given a baseline set of page/graphic templates to start from, along with front-page illustrations from Lucie. Markets then would localize the data and customize the package as needed.

What’s next? 

More to come in 2016, especially since we saw so much success externally and internally with this project. We’re hoping to increase the volume and velocity as well.