By Bianca Cseke

Sandhya Kambhampati knows a thing or two about data journalism.

As a reporter on the Los Angeles Times’ data desk, she covers everything from elections to demographics and how natural disasters affect tourism in small California towns. When she was with Propublica Illinois, Kambhampati helped with an investigation on the Cook County property tax assessment system, a piece that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

But even though nearly all of Kambhampati’s work uses data and public records to get vital information to the public, she never forgets about the people who her stories impact.

“People are always at stake,” she said. “You always want to go back to the people whose lives and livelihoods are impacted.”

For example, the property tax assessment story Kambhampati worked on started with a tip Jason Grotto, the other Propublica reporter she worked with on the story, received from a real person — not from digging through sets of data on a fishing expedition. The reporters also told the stories of people impacted by property tax assessments favoring pricier commercial buildings at the expense of the owners of cheaper ones.

That included Brenda and Larry Doyle, a couple who own a daycare in Chicago’s West Auburn Gresham neighborhood. Their business’s property value was assessed higher than what they had actually paid for it and that value never went down, while a nearby larger, more expensive building kept getting lower assessments.

When asked what a journalism student who’s about to graduate should know about data reporting, Kambhampati said what reporters from every area of journalism have given as advice: Understand how to write a story and how to conduct an interview.

While it can be useful — even vital — to know how to clean data so it can be understandable for reporters and the general population, once that part of the job is done, even a data reporter needs to be able to think in terms of old-fashioned, basic reporting.

“The way you interview people, you want to interview your data,” Kambhampati said.

That means that when a reporter looks at a set of data, they should ask “the same fundamental questions,” such as why the data says something, who is responsible for it and who it affects, how it came to be and what it is truly saying in the first place.

And no matter how much a data journalist immerses themselves in numbers, they should still remember to always include the people affected by the story.

“Don’t bog the story down with too many numbers,” Kambhampati said.

Other than that, aspiring data journalists should remember to send out records requests early on in the reporting process rather than waiting until later, she said. You never know when officials will put up a fight in getting a reporter the information they need.

Plus, that data can take a lot of work to clean up.

“That’s the thing about data: It might be clean in the heads of the people who put it together, but it might not be for everyone else,” Kambhampati said.

By never forgetting about why most journalists do the work they do — to help people — Sandhya Kambhampati has managed to produce work that has made a difference beyond just the awards her work has garnered or been a finalist for, like when she was part of a team that investigated the German nursing home system. That investigation brought about discussion across Germany about how its nursing homes should be evaluated. By following some of Kambhampati’s advice and working to produce journalism that makes a difference, journalists can help change lives for the better.

 

-30-