Global Media Award Finalist: Inside a month of America's school shootings
INMA has announced finalists for 2024 Global Media Awards and my project with The Economist made the list!
The International News Media Association has selected The Economist’s “Inside a Month of America’s School Shootings” as a global award finalist from 700 entries submitted by 245 news brands in 43 countries.
For more background on this 11-month project, here are two articles I wrote about it: US Government is 'not doing their homework' on gun violence at schools and This school shooting data was featured by The Economist.
Overview of the project
The Economist aimed to depict a typical month of gun crime in schools, and profile a series of incidents that illustrated the difficulties of preventing such crime. There is no federal record of every time a gun is fired on school property in America, nor an agreed definition of a school shooting. This made collecting and verifying data tricky. We worked with David Riedman, a researcher who maintains a database of incidents, but also verified each of his reports ourselves, by contacting dozens of schools and law-enforcement agencies.
Many schools and authorities were reluctant to talk about the incidents, either due to ongoing legal proceedings or because of reputational risk. The reporting required both statistical rigour and sensitivity, especially when convincing people to speak about their experiences on camera.
Finally, though not the first time The Economist has combined video, data and text journalism, this is the most ambitious and complex project in which we have done so. We wanted to maintain The Economist’s thorough analysis while telling more personal stories, and explore new ways of presenting our journalism (e.g., in an explorable calendar at the end of the online article, allowing readers to dig deeper into our data).
Impact
The project shone light on an often poorly covered aspect of gun crime in America: the lack of comprehensive data collection and the poor policy choices that can lead to. It also shared the sometimes traumatic personal stories of people caught up in school gun-crime. And as a result of our work with David Riedman of the K-12 school shootings database, he is now tracking “swatting” incidents (hoax threats that prompt a police response) in schools.
Within The Economist it showed the value of new ways of storytelling, combining video reporting with data journalism and more traditional reporting. The success of the project has led to more such collaboration, as well as a renewed appetite to find new digital formats and methods of presentation that can offer readers a richer experience than a print article might.
Media associated with this campaign
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.