data.world is thrilled to partner with the Texas Tribune, the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. As an Austin-based company, data.world is thrilled to leverage our previous data journalism impact work and strong commitment to transparency to champion the important work of the Tribune.
We’re excited to share a Q&A with Chris Essig, Data Visuals Editor at Texas Tribune to share more about how they use data to inform Texans and their goals for data in the future.
How does the Texas Tribune leverage data to serve the public?
Since the Tribune was founded 15 years ago, data reporting has been a major part of our newsroom’s mission, playing a pivotal part in our biggest and most important stories. Over time, the data visuals team has become Texans go-to source on topics like the elections, climate change, campaign finance, the Texas legislature and much more.
My team is a group of developers focused on accessing, analyzing and visualizing data that’s important and relevant to people in Texas. To do this, we often collaborate closely with reporters in the newsroom, who are primarily responsible for reaching out to sources and writing stories. The people on my team have more technical skills than reporters, meaning we can gather and analyze data they otherwise wouldn’t be able to use in their stories. This makes the stories more authoritative: we could just say a trend is happening but it’s much more powerful to show the readers the data that proves it.
We also feel visualizing data is an important part of leveraging data to serve the public. Studies show data visualizations can help people understand trends quicker and, when done well, can be very memorable long term. Oftentimes when we are done analyzing data, we will visualize it for our audience as well.
Why have you chosen to share open data on data.worlds open community platform?
One of our core missions at the Tribune is shining a spotlight on the state government in Texas. Because of that, the Tribune has had some version of a public-facing salaries database for over 10 years, with the most recent version first being published in May 2020. One of things we are able to do with the latest version is update it more regularly: we now update the data four times a year. We also set it up so the spreadsheet on our data.world site is updated as soon as we get new data.
Our data is obtained from the state’s comptroller’s office and includes information on every state employee, which is roughly 150,000 rows of data. The state offers the data to us in a consistent format, which helps us process it quickly. All this means that the data we publish on data.world is both comprehensive and timely, which we are hoping makes it easier for people in the community to analyze for their own research purposes.
We also want to use data.world to highlight some of the trends we’ve seen in the data. For instance, the charts on our site starkly show large disparities across state agencies when it comes to employee pay. Generally speaking, most employees make very little compared to the person who runs the agency.
Finally, we have uploaded several older salary requests as well, which we hope will help with statewide historical comparisons.
What do you hope people leverage Tribune data for?
As mentioned, we’d love for people with academic backgrounds to find and use the data we post on data.world for research purposes. Throughout the history of our salaries site, the data has been used a handful of times by academics researching employment pay trends over time. We are honored to see it used in this way. Typically our audience is readers of the Tribune and we focus on serving them. But having it cited in studies is a whole different type of impact for us.
More generally speaking, we want people to use our data to become more knowledgeable about issues in Texas. We receive messages all the time from readers who are impressed by our work and learn something important because of our coverage that they wouldn’t otherwise know. Because my team has been a major part of the Tribune since it started, we have always been mission-driven with the way we analyze and publish data. We want to continue to do this to serve as many readers as we can across this big, complicated state.
data.world is thrilled to host Texas Tribunes data on our open community site, and help make accessible this impactful data from the Tribune to make sure all Texans are informed and engaged.
To learn more about how you can leverage data.worlds’ community platform to help you find data, discover new insights, build visuals and collaborate, click here! If interested in partnering together on an open data project, please contact community@data.world.
To learn more about Texas Tribune and their work throughout the State of Texas please click here to visit their site.
