I just finished the IRE boot camp in data reporitng, and I’m ready to use SQL in my last week of intersession reporting at the Missourian. Katherine asked me a while back to look into I-70’s crash rates near Columbia, and so I’ve brainstormed with Charles Minshew of IRE to scrape data from the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s online records. I’ll use these not just to finish my CAR final project, but to analyze and write a piece on the crashes near the city, looking for the why/how of crashes, whether they’ve increased with time, and how they compare to other stretches of the highway.

When I started reporting, I understood articles as primarily the function of one person’s work. I’ve known that to be false for some time now, as each piece is different and all things published at reputable outlets require a heavy load from several people in different positions. But with the Burton paid leave piece, I wrote the first 40 percent and the rest came from editors. I’m still the only person on the byline. Would it be kosher to list that as my clip? I wasn’t the person coordinating the investigative reporting discussed in the piece, and didn’t have a hand in many of those grafs. Would it not be dishonest to claim that work as my own?

After three days working on the Moberly double homicide, I’ll admit that I’m tired. It’s very much a downer, with a lot of people in bad places in their lives, but it’s also complicated and much of it remains unknown. I have other stories I want to work on: I-70’s high death rates near Columbia, the cost and availability of diabetes supplies in Columbia (both good centerpiece fodder), and a historic home being sold for development. Plus, I’ve got outside commitments and would like to draw down my reporting time just a smidge to dedicate more effort to those. Hopefully I get the chance to take a breather—this one is really a sad one, and it’s getting to me.

I got a genuine thank you from a family member of someone killed the other day. I’m not sure what it was for; was it my provision of information to them, my willingness to talk and listen, or my desire to get details to the public to inform them of these issues? I don’t know. A cynic would say it’s bad if any source is grateful for your work, but I don’t think that’s really how this works. Our work can please some, and hurt others. Most journalism does not exist in the political press: engaging with people and favoring some people’s ideas and tellings is, at the end of the day, inevitable. We’re part of communities, and our work has ripples. If my work results in a family member of someone killed feeling even a little better, I’d argue that’s not just a good effect, but part of what we do.

Today, we’re thinking about heading down to the Randolph County Courthouse to get records and interview folks. Yesterday, we were scooped by several publications because they had contact information or had gone out to Moberly to gather information. I was hustling really hard yesterday, trying to get this story together, but we were scooped a good few times as the charges/arrests continued to develop, because those folks outreported us.