On Tuesday September 7 my public affairs class got a visit from an investigative reporter from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Matt Doig. From the beginning, Doig offered some basic examples and advice to my entire class how to benefit from public records as journalists. With the mass amount of public records available to the community it can sometimes be difficult to organize paper databases in correct order. Without the technology we have today, it would take months or even years to discover any of the interesting facts in public records. Doig offered a lot of advice to my classmates on how to utilize databases for journalists. He first demonstrated a database in public records of every teacher in the state of Florida. That’s over 100,000 teachers! The database included such information like where they work, their social security numbers, and even their test scores to become teachers (which was not easy to obtain). He told us how he and some other colleague’s uncovered teachers who received low test grades that were placed at poorer schools than those who scored higher than them.
After providing us this example, Doig reiterated that everyone needs to learn how to use Excel or Access to make databases easier to do, “Databases can end a debate and give definitive answers.” Another fun fact I learned from this lecture is that Florida is the number one state for housing fraud in the United States. Even with the real estate market the way it was when the economy crashed, I never once suspected that Florida would be at the top of the list. Doig told us a story when he and his colleagues discovered, through public records, a way to catch some of these frauds. Through a database, they limited a search to 55,000 people who had sold a house twice within 90 days. From there they had to dig deeper to uncover the criminals who were abusing the system.
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