Rachel does journalism

This week, I was one of the reporters writing about an assault on a transgender woman that happened last week at a bakery in Spokane. Here, I want to tell the backstory of how this story came to be, because I think it illustrates the problem with automatically assuming the media doesn't care about particular types of stories.

The woman was attacked on a Friday night, and I first heard about the story from a friend on Sunday afternoon. She'd texted me asking if I knew anything, and I told her I'd look into it on Monday when I was back at work.

By the time I got to work Monday morning, the city's Human Rights Commission had issued a call for citizens to show support for the victim. People spoke at city council. We wrote a story. All three of our city's TV stations wrote a story. The alt-weekly covered it. A bunch of LGBT media outlets picked it up. 

Police released photos of the suspects and arrested them less than a day later. Media followed up, publishing photos of the suspects and writing about their court appearance, where both men were released without bail.

Much of this came as a result of the bakery's owner, who made some phone calls and got local leaders interested in the case. We got wind of it soon after, and were quick to get a story up.

Our columnist spoke with the owner about her efforts to get the word out. She talks about waiting, for a full day after the attack, for the news media to report what had happened. When she heard nothing - from us, from the police - she decided to get the ball rolling.

I understand the impulse to think that the media doesn't care about particular crimes or particular victims. We pick and choose what we report, and often that process has the effect of further marginalizing people who are already marginalized. It's no secret, for instance, that we're more likely to cover a murder case from the initial gunshot to the final gavel if the victim isn't the type you'd expect to be killed - someone young, with potential and without a criminal history. 

Add that to the fact that media coverage of transgender people tends to lack context, misuse terminology or be downright offensive, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we might not care about this particular woman.

But we did. Without exception, we wrote about this as soon as someone told us about it. And had we known sooner, we would have written sooner. We can't do our jobs if people don't occasionally reach out and tell us what's going on.

My job is to cover crime and public safety. For the one-off, day-to-day stories telling people "this crime happened," I tend to get my information from scanner traffic (while the crime is in progress), police press releases (which usually go out for major crimes) and court documents (generally filed after an arrest has been made). 

That means if a crime happens during off hours (late at night, especially on the weekend) and the cops don't decide to send out information right away, we usually won't hear about it for a few days until it trickles through the grapevine - which is more or less what happened with this assault. So the best way for someone to get information out there, if they think the cops aren't paying attention or taking a crime seriously, or if their account differs significantly from the official one, is to call me and tell me what's going on.

I can't promise every reporter will always care about the particular story you have. I get a lot of calls from a lot of people who are convinced they've been slighted, injured, maligned, slandered and attacked. Some end up being stories. Most don't. But the ones that do are often some of my best work - I like writing about things I know people care about, especially when I feel like I can help amplify the voice of someone who might otherwise be ignored.

I'm back!

Now that I've been doing my Fancy New Job for two months, I felt compelled to share a list of The Best Crime News in Spokane (or at least, the weirdest stuff I've had to report on):

Thieves steal five stained glass windows from church

Shooter, victim say they were trying to break up the same argument

Road rage incident leads to attack with metal mace

Woman arrested after breaking down apartment door, claiming to be special ops agent

It's my last day at my current job - I'm graduating from towns of 3,000 people to a city of more than 300,000. And this thing I made is the most fitting tribute to my time as a rural journalist.

I've been quiet on here for a month or so, but behind the scenes, a lot of exciting stuff has been going on. Starting on Oct. 13, I'll be moving to the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. to be a breaking news/crime reporter.

^Roughly how I feel about this. (Though also, who doesn't want an excuse to use the Ron Swanson dancing gif?)

Excitement aside, I've also been frantically trying to find housing, write my how-to-cover-my-current-beat documentation, research all the activities I can do in a city with a slightly larger population, read up on the history of Spokane and its police force, and do a bunch of other things. Hence the lack of blogging and the lack of data journalism.

But good news: cops and crime are PERFECT for data stuff. I'm confident I'll have something exciting to blog in that regard before I've been in my new job for too long. In the meantime, though, it's going to be a bit quiet around here while I figure out my new life.

Data Project #3: A graph of Dayton School District enrollment using D3 (a JavaScript library for manipulating stuff using data).

It's taken me a while, but I finally put together a simple, clean graph of enrollment for the Dayton School District, which is one of several small rural school districts I cover.

You might look at this and think, "How did this take you 3 weeks?" And my answer would be, "Clearly, you have never tried to learn D3 during your spare time."

I relied almost entirely on this wonderful tutorial by Scott Murray, which involved a lot of hand-holding with the code, so I'm not as confident as I'd like to be that I could build something from scratch with D3. But I think I'd be better prepared to try, and I'd like to do that at some point down the road during this project.

As with the TileMill project from a few weeks ago, I feel like I've been exposed to an amazing, powerful set of tools for visualizing data and have barely scratched the surface.

Reflections on the data

I wanted to do so much more with this graph, and probably will down the line. It's related to a story I've been working on for several months about students who transfer out of the district.

Last year, a total of 89 students living within Dayton's boundaries were open-enrolled in other school districts or online programs, which cost them about $600,000 in state funding (versus $3.5 million total funding). It's a huge issue for them, and it's also created a chicken-and-egg situation where some of the things that might keep students in the district cost money they don't have because so many people have left. I spent this week drafting a story we're planning to run in a few weeks looking at why this is happening and what might be done about it.

Enrollment decline is related to the out-transfer issue, but it's also its own thing. I really wanted to plot enrollment on a line graph against county population (relatively stable from 1997-present) and county population ages 5-19 (declining over the same period, but I'm not sure by how much relative to enrollment). But my D3 skills are not quite there yet.

Reflections/self-eval

I really wanted to get year labels on the data, but wasn't sure how to do that using the tutorial we were doing. I did successfully make a separate set of text elements inside an SVG element to function as year labels, but I wasn't able to get them styled or visible or placed where I wanted, and I figured I'd spend long enough messing around with the graph.

While the utility without year labels is questionable, I like the overall look of the graph quite a bit: it's clean, simple and easy to spot the trend in enrollment.