NewsBeat

May 2023 NewsBeat 20 NewsBeat A NEWSLETTER FOR NEW YORK'S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS Published by the New York Press Association 621 Columbia Street Extension, Suite 100, Cohoes, NY 12047 518.464.6483 • 518.464.6489 fax • www.nynewspapers.com Executive Editor — Michelle K. Rea Layout & Design — Rich Hotaling PA NY Display Advertising Sizes and Standard Box 4.5"w x 3.25"h $300 Horizontal 9.25"w x 3.25"h $500 Vertical 4.5"w x 10.25"h $750 Full Page 9.25"w x 10.25"h $1,000 By CLARK MERREFIELD Need US government data? Acquaint yourself with TRAC at Syracuse University I t is worthwhile for any journalist covering U.S. public policy to become familiar with the data work of the Transactional Records Access Clearing- house, housed at Syracuse University. TRAC is best known for, and most often used for, its immigration data, most of which is available to the public free of charge and simpler to access than going to government agencies directly. The organization also gath- ers and disseminates data related to enforcement, prosecutions and other actions taken by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service. TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, primarily grant-funded data organiza- tion established in 1989 that is affiliat- ed with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse. Data that TRAC has gathered and made public has recently been used in stories produced by a variety of news media organizations, including Fox News, the Associated Press and various local outlets. The guiding principle at TRAC is to increase government transparency and accountability, says TRAC researcher Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who has a doc- torate in geography. Executing on that principle involves gathering information from opaque agencies at the heart of U.S. immigra- tion policy and other topics. "The fact that we're known for immi- gration is sort of secondary to the fact that we're interested in transparency," says Kocher. TRAC staff use Freedom of Informa- tion Act requests to gather data from the federal government. The aim of TRAC's data gathering is to understand how government processes work, who is affected and how they are affected. The organization is particularly inter- ested in areas of the U.S. government — agencies, departments, offices — that do not make data readily available to the public. Echoing the journalistic investigative process, TRAC staff determine which agencies to ask for public records, and ways to ask for that information, in part by examining what officials say in Congressional testimony and other public settings, to assess whether there are fuller datasets informing those statements which could be worth que- rying. TRAC also produces in-depth reports throughout the year. The data gather- ing and deep-dive reports represent an amalgam of the journalistic and analyti- cal approaches of TRAC's directors and founders: Susan Long, a statistician and associate professor at Syracuse Univer- sity, and David Burnham, a former New York Times reporter and also an asso- ciate professor at Syracuse who has covered local, state and federal enforce- ment issues since 1966. "We really have built into our ethos a profound respect and admiration for the work of journalists," Kocher says. Long, Kocher and other staff use statistical techniques to check and

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