From the newsroom

Good data reporting requires two things: a willingness to follow the data and context.

As part of our occasional series looking at the salaries of public employees, I dug into a very clean set of data provided by the City of Bellingham. I started with an initial "interview" of the data in R — a programming language. I asked some basic questions:

1. What departments get the largest slice of the city budget?

2. How much overtime is being paid?

3. Who are the highest earners?

4. How many people make more than six figures?

5. How many are paid a "living wage" based on the MIT Living Wage calculator?

At this point in the interviewing process, I was getting my bearings and also looking for outliers.

The initial plan was to write a single story about all city employee salaries. However, the data indicated that the most obvious story was the massive slice of the pie (nearly $40 million) going to staff the fire department, which also had 21 of the 25 highest paid employees.

But that didn't tell a real story, because there was no context. So, I sat down for interviews with Mayor Kim Lund, Fire Chief Bill Hewett and Scott Farrell, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Local 106 union.

I asked them all the questions that the data couldn't answer. (I also asked them if I was misunderstanding or misinterpreting anything in the data.)Between those interviews and the interview with the data, a much more precise picture of the truth came into focus. You can check out that story here. 

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