ABSTRACT
Journalists outside the United States often have significantly less access to data in their countries and find that they need to get paper records and enter information from those records into a spreadsheet or database manager. Some journalists build databases to keep track of contacts and sources. The newspaper broke stories showing with scrupulous detail how the location of a person’s office, along with the building design, affected his or her chance of survival. The database also provided leads on survivors, stories on rescue efforts, and many other stories. Many reporters initially build a database to keep track of information about political contributors. A political database might include the contributor’s name, street, city, state, amount given, to whom it was contributed, and date of contribution. The results were irrefutable: of the 100 people selected to become river pilots, 85 were related to other pilots.
