Web treasure hunt:
10 questions to test
newsroom literacy

Why a test?

Who can surf the Web? All of us. But are we literate? While every newsroom has people who are advanced researchers, many of us are struggling. We find too little information or, more frequently, too much. Can we afford to have a person in any newsroom job who is not Web literate?

Any test of literacy is subjective. But these 10 questions are the kind that come up in newsrooms every day.

Each question has a hint, and an answer. Each answer also deals with these issues: How did you find that? How do I know this information is sound? And how do I attribute this?

The rules: Each question should take less than 10 minutes to answer. Give yourself 10 points for each correct answer.

The test:

• 1. Adjust for inflation. You're editing an article that refers to Babe Ruth's salary of $80,000 in 1931 (when, as he said, he "had a better year" than President Hoover). How much would that be in today's dollars?

  Hint for question 1

  Answer for question 1

• 2. Match a name to a phone number. A tipster has passed on a terrific lead on a federal investigation of your mayor. Caller ID tells you the tipster called from 202-965-3515? Without calling the number, find out: Whose phone number is that?

  Hint for question 2

  Answer for question 2

• 3. Check your law. A 9-year-old girl has been killed riding her bike. She was not wearing a helmet. What is your state or city law on bicycle helmets?

  Hint for question 3

  Answer for question 3

• 4. Prep for an interview. In 10 minutes you'll be covering a speech by an author named Grossman, who contends that video games are a cause of school shootings, because they condition children to kill. But you have an early deadline, so you have to do the interview before the speech. The book has "killing" in the title. What is the exact title? What term did he coin? What other books has he written? What town is he from, and why might that be interesting? What five questions do you want to ask him before the speech?

  Hint for question 4

  Answer for question 4

• 5. Source a quotation. When the nominees for president pick women as running mates, we'll have to be careful with that saying, "politics makes strange bedfellows." Who coined that maxim? And isn't there an earlier use of the phrase, "strange bedfellows"? Who said it first? (Warning: This is a hard one. If nothing else, you'll see how hard it is to use the Web to attribute a quotation.)

  Hint for question 5

  Answer for question 5

• 6. Background a business executive. Melvin J. Gordon just gave a huge contribution to your art museum. All you know is that he runs a company in the U.S. Who is he? What company? Besides its namesake product, what else does this company produce? What is his annual salary? What was his total cash compensation? How much is he worth (at least in company stock), as of today? What basic bio information do you have on him?

  Hint for question 6

  Answer for question 6

  
  
• 7. You caught a break. This question is under construction.

• 8. Background a Web site. Suppose that journalist Bob Baker has some gossip about your editor on his Web site, at http://www.newsthinking.com/. You need to reach Baker by phone. All you know is his Web site address, but no phone number is listed there. But you know his Web domain name, newsthinking.com. From that, find his phone number.

  Hint for question 8

  Answer for question 8

• 9. Spot a trend. It's bridal story time. What has happened to the age at which people get married for the first time, over the past 100 years, in the U.S.? (Hint: Not quite what you think.) When you find the overall answer, look for several angles on the story: What is the trend in the past five years? How has the difference in age between men and women changed? What is the phone number of the demographers who can help sort out the reasons for these changes?

  Hint for question 9

  Answer for question 9

• 10. See where you rank. Estimates of poverty in every school district in the U.S. are made every few years by the U.S. Census Bureau. You can find the 2000 file on the Census site, at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/saipe/school/sd00ftpdoc.html, but for this exercise you can also use a copy of the 1995 file, from the training files page at http://PowerReporting.com/files/ under "poverty." You can view the list in a Web browser, but it's darn inconvenient: The districts are listed in alphabetical order, and only the raw numbers are given, not the percentage of kids in poverty. (This is typical of government Web sites.) You want the schools in rank order, with percentages, so districts are fairly compared. For this task you need a Web browser, a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel is the easiest and most ubiquitous), and 10 minutes. So the questions: (a) How do the 20 biggest school districts in the country compare in percentage of children in poverty? (b) How does your school district rank, among those in your state, in percentage of children in poverty? (c) How does your school district rank among its peers, which for this purpose we'll define as the 10 districts in your state that are closest to yours in raw population of the district?

  Hint for question 10

  Answer for question 10

• Bonus question. Math for journalists. The Web won't help you here.

  After the Amtrak train "The City of New Orleans" hit a truck at a crossing near Bourbonnais, Ill., the National Transportation Safety Board measured off the distances at the crossing. The investigators told reporters that the truck driver could have seen the train approaching in the darkness at no more than 644 feet from the crossing. NTSB also said that the train was traveling at 79 miles per hour, the speed limit on that track. So, how many seconds before impact could the driver have seen the train? And if the crossing gates are timed to come down 27 seconds before the train reaches the crossing, what's the story?

  Hint for the bonus question

  Answer for the bonus question

A primer on Web searching is available at http://PowerReporting.com/altavista.html.

You can reach Bill Dedman by e-mail at Bill@PowerReporting.com.