Keep stories short and let the data shine
I spent last week wading in data for our second biennial
package "Judging
the Judges."
It’s a survey I helped develop two years ago with our local
bar association, getting lawyers to help evaluate judicial performance. We also elect state judges in Wichita but
rules on judicial ethics prevent candidates from campaigning or really saying
much. So we also evaluate the performance of attorneys who are running for
office, and it’s become an important guide for voters.
We started this, in part because special interest groups
were doing their own evaluations and endorsements, and we wanted to provide a
more objective tool. No one knows
judges better than the lawyers who face them.
I really works well on the web. From my spreadsheets,
content producer Katie
Lohrenz built an interactive
feature allowing readers to compare scores between judges and candidates. You can see, we kept the copy short, because the real star is the data. We only had a week to prepare from the time we received the raw data until Sunday's publication.
It’s rated among our
top web features so far, both Sunday and today.