Ready Reporter

from Landings.com

More than 470 people died in airline accidents in 2010, the latest year for which the National Transportation Safety Board reports. That’s many fewer lives than are killed each year on highways, nearly 33,000.  Still, you’ll probably have an airline crash to cover in your career.   Are you ready?

One of the mantras I distinctly being told in the TV newsroom when I first started: If there’s a plane crach, first at the scene, get the tail number.  The tail number is the key to finding much more. Plug that number into the online site, Landings.com and you can find the plane’s registration, model number, read any previous problems with the plane (known as service difficulty reports), and more.

The tail number begins with a N and you put it into the search box on this Landings.com page.  See the screenshot clip at the right for a list of lots of other helpful information at the Landings site.

Other websites to help in your reporting:

• How the NTSB investigates crashes
• Common accident themes or key factors in accidents, which the NTSB calls “threat categories” such as birds, poor crew communication, etc.
• FAA list of major accidents, by decade.
• Aviation Network’s database, updated weekly of incidents worldwide.

Part of a series on how databases can add value to daily news stories. 

Have you heard the political drumbeat?  The national presidential race appears down to two contendors.  U.S. Senate campaigns are likely in full swing. And in some states, the politicing may be ongoing in state or local races, as well.  So campaign finance databases can be of great help in stories, and not just those about politics.  You can use them to:

• find key contributors
• track the industries supporting certain candidates
• check candidate expenditures
• check candidate and/or donor addresses
• find interviewees who have an informed opinion on the race (because they’ve donated)

To underscore the latter point, it’s not just political stories where you can use this database. Sometimes hard to find a supporter of Candidate X, or someone from one of the alternative political parties.  To find those interviewees,  search for  donors to that candidate or donors to a previous candidate from that lesser-known party.

For federal campaigns, I recommend these two websites:

• Open Secrets
• Federal Election Commission.

With a hat tip to news librarians MargotWilliams, Leigh Montgomery and Derek Willis , I also found some master sites that link to all state campaign finance reports by state. Some of the links I tested aren’t updated, so if you can’t find your state,  I would go to the state website, find the elections unit and go from there.

•  Federal Elections Commission chart on state filings  (see far right column)
•  Investigative Reporters and Editor’s Campaign Finance site
•  Institute for Money in State Politics state overviews.

The latter is an amazing site and I got lost in wonder for 20 minutes!  So when you have an extra 20, take a look and learn it so when you need it in a pinch, you are already familiar with it.

Part of a series  on databases that add value to a daily story.

A well-known person in our area, under federal investigation, suddenly put his house up for sale.  It became a page 1 story in the local paper, with details about the house. The story included the house layout, the number of rooms, and the home’s value.  The reporter may have gotten all this from an online real estate listing, but did you know a lot of this information, and sometimes more,  is available through online property records provided by municipal governments?

The county in which I live puts all the property tax records online for easy perusing. I can find out the number of rooms, the home’s assessment, the taxes required (and whether they’ve been paid), and even comparables  in the same area.  I can trace the ownership and see how much each owner paid for the home.

Reporters can use  property records to confirm ownership of a home, find an address when they need to send a photographer to get photos/video of it, or go themselves for  an evening home interview with someone who has been ducking them.

Many cities and counties have property tax records online. Check at your county’s website or call the local property tax office.  You can pay several online services for records, but before you do, see BRB Publications. It has the  best general directory I’ve found to find free public records by state.  BRB, Tempe, Ariz.,  publishes books and online sites  for locating public records.

Leave a comment below if you know of other master sites for free property records or tell us ways you’ve used property records in a story.

Start of a series on databases accessible quickly to add value to a daily story. 

Here's just a portion of the screen from the Census Quick Facts page for Onondaga County, N.Y.

I’ve just finished teaching students about databases that can be accessed quickly and can make a story stronger with context or a take-away fact. Reporters, especially in TV,  have so little time now to research anything, so I thought @readyreporter readers might like to know about some of these quick helps.  I’ll start today and share several over the next few weeks.

One easy-to-use site is the Census Quick Facts database.  While digging through the full census site  is a bit daunting, the Quick Facts page is just three clicks away and gives a lot of interesting information such as:

• population under 5, or over 65
• number of veterans
• home ownership rate
• commute time
• per capita (money) income and median household income
• home residency more than one year
• business ownership by women and minorities
• building permits

You can search by city or county and it doesn’t take long to add up the numbers for the counties in your media market.  Try it out.

And if you have a database or website that is essential to your reporting, leave a comment below. I’d like to learn from you.