Contest Winner Tips: Willamette School District's Web of Deals

Editor's note: EWA will post tips and advice over the next two weeks from first-prize winners of EWA's National Awards for Education Reporting. Tracy Loew of the Statesman Journal won first prize in the small-market investigative reporting category.

WESD's Web of Deals

My story on a decade of mismanagement and insider deals at Oregon's second-largest school district was the result of years of developing sources and collecting documents. I'd previously written about problems there that had been ignored, and had leads on many more.

When several whistle-blowers came forward, executive editor Bill Church and I decided it was time to not just follow up all those leads but connect them with those who benefited. We both saw the potential of new journalism tools to report and present the story in ways that wouldn't have been possible just a few years earlier.

In addition to traditional reporting - I filed 38 public records requests and interviewed more than five dozen sources - I was able to make many connections using online sources such as Nexis, online property, business and education databases, and even Facebook and LinkedIn. I used several tools to help me visualize the connections, including UCINet, NodeXL and Many Eyes.

I used Document Cloud to link from the story to more than 300 annotated documents cited in the report, and Simile to create an interactive timeline spanning nearly 20 years.

I built multiple spreadsheets to track board and administrator spending and built timelines to track complaints about the agency and the state education department, and to see property deals from start to finish. More spreadsheets tracked my documents, interviews and other data.

The highlight of the report was an interactive "wheel" network diagram that allowed readers to click on any person or entity and see the connections. It was built by our Web developers using InfoVis.