Assembling the Story

Maria Ines Zamudio: David Eads, a developer, and I, a journalist, had talked about what would be the perfect project to work on over the weekend for Migra Hack, a hackathon using immigration data. But it wasn’t until the rest of our team joined us that we took on the challenge of visualizing the story of millions of undocumented people who will not qualify for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

The idea was to show in a simple way the extent of the problem. How many people locally wouldn’t qualify for insurance? And what options do these immigrants have for treatment when they get sick? This part of the project is very similar to what I typically do when I’m working on a story, but the second part was new and exciting. But it was that part of the project that I strongly believe is desperately needed in many newsrooms, including my own.

David and Wilberto Morales, a database editor at Hoy Newspaper, worked together to build a platform to showcase the story. David built our project, Finding Care, using Tarbell. This is a platform for building online stories using Google Spreadsheets, where the data is used to build the project. While the developers worked on building the web site for the project, photojournalist Lucio Villa edited audio and photos.

Reporter Yana Kunichoff and I wrote the story and pulled the rest of the missing data with additional help from Lucio. We pulled data from PUMs data because it is the most detailed census data available. Trying to find demographic data about undocumented immigrants is difficult. The data available is only an estimate. We wanted to make sure we were able to find the closest data available. We pulled data on non-citizens living in Chicago and insurance coverage. We also did some more reporting to find the cost of going to the emergency room or the cost of treating uninsured patients in Cook County.

The end project combined, what I think, is the best in journalism—a good story, visuals, and a great presentation. Thankfully the judges saw the power of this story and gave our team, Los Almighty Windy City Data Hustlers, the top prize.

The Tech Behind It

David Eads: Finding Care was built using Tarbell, a platform for building online stories using Google Spreadsheets. We set up a worksheet for every slide that controlled the position and size of the text box on each slide and any other data we wanted associated with each slide.

CSS3 transitions are used for the grayscale-to-color effect (which only appears in Webkit based browsers like Chrome). A roughly 150-line JavaScript app manages the scrolling slide transitions and adds the audio player and chart. We use jPlayer for audio on the first slide and Highcharts to create a graph on the third slide.

Future versions of the site could better handle image full-screening and work better on smart phones, tablets held the tall way, and Internet Explorer. Want to make the project better? You can, because it’s open source.