Quill
published by the Society of Professional Journalsists
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With the nation debating the merits of a “flat-tax” system, Craig McGuire participated in an ambitious project to prove that the flat tax already exists, under the guidance of Christopher J. Feola from the prestigious Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
(Christopher J. Feola is the Director of the Media Center of the American Press Institute. He teaches advanced computer-assisted reporting and research at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.)
Armed with a simple spreadsheet program and a desire to learn about computer-assisted reporting, the graduate students plowed through the Social Security laws and the U.S. Tax Code. Among the findings: the media as a whole has underreported the changes in social Security and income tax reforms since the early 1990s.
Notes on Reporting: The reporting team contributed to this series of features that ran in Quill magazine, a monthly periodical published by the Society of Professional Journalists.
For this undertaking, the team met in a state-of-the-art computer lab at Columbia University equipped with Intel Pentium PCs running Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Microsoft Office Professional. The majority of the work performed for this project was done in Microsoft eXcel, the spreadsheet component of Microsoft Office.
The team collected and shared data as a group. A list was made for all the common data needed for the project. This included:
• Tax Tables for the last five decades
• Social Security tables from the inception of the program
• Income and demographic data from the Census Bureau
• Federal rules and regulations, such as the House Ways and Means Committee Green Book.
This raw data was used to build computer models used as the premise to perform investigative reporting.
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I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. ~Jack Smith
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