Question 1 Answer

Answer: Ruth's $80,000 in 1931 would be worth about $935,000, as of December 2001.

How do I find that? Based on the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Labor. The BLS calculator is at its Consumer Price Indexes page. Its calculator allows only numbers less than $10,000, so use $8,000, and then multiply the result by 10.

And a private calculator, based on the same information, allows regional calculations, from George Landau's NewsEngin Cost-of-Living Calculator. Choose "all items" if you like, then "U.S. city average" or your region, and fill in the form. These two numbers may vary a bit, depending on how up to date each site is.

Comment: The Consumer Price Index is an imprecise measure of inflation. Remember that it measures the buying power of a dollar, based on a market basket of goods. The items in the basket don't change often enough to keep up with changes in consumer tastes. And not everyone spends money on the same goods. (Babe Ruth and Mark McGwire, for example.) So the CPI is good enough for a broad reference (such as Ruth's salary), but let's take more care if we're using it to say that the local school superintendent is seeking a raise that outstrips inflation.

How do I know this is right? First, if you use George's calculator, he gives the appearance of reliability. He explains how often he updates the data, and how the CPI works. (See Background.) Still, we are trusting his math. If you're the belt-and-suspenders type, you might have to look up the year-to-year inflation rate at the BLS, and do the computation yourself with a calculator or spreadsheet.

How do I attribute this? Better to attribute to the BLS. Your editor probably won't let you put George in all of your stories, and what makes him an authority anyway? In a whimsical reference, you may decide that no attribution is necessary. ("Ruth made less than an average relief pitcher makes today, adjusted for inflation.") In a more controversial context, you may need to be more specific.

Question 2 Answer

Answer: That number is listed for journalist Elsa Walsh and, somewhat more famously, Robert U. Woodward. Alright, perhaps Bob's not going to call and give you story tips. But who knows? He might have spares.

How do I find that? The reverse directory from InfoSpace.com is a good one. You'll get similar results from others. (By the way, note that InfoSpace will search even if you just know the start of the number.)

Comment: The residential telephone listings on the Web usually do not come from up-to-the-minute directory assistance from the major phone companies. Instead, they come from printed directories that are scanned in by three vendors. So numbers are often wrong. But searching is convenient. The best thing is that they will show you the neighbors, others on the same street or in the same building. But Walsh and Woodward are listed in telephone directories only by their phone number, with no street adress, so the "find neighbors" option doesn't show up in this case.

How do I know this is right? You don't. But now that you know a name, you can double-check with directory assistance.

How do I attribute this? This fact probably wouldn't get reported, but if you had to attribute information from a reverse directory, you usually should make clear to the reader that the information is often out of date.

Question 3 Answer

Answer: A good list of state and city laws on bicycle helmets is at the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute. This link is available from its main page. The institute explains, "There is no federal law in the U.S. requiring helmets. States and localities began adopting laws in 1987, but there is no formal central registry for them."

How do I find that?At the Yahoo directory, a search for "bicycle helmet" (with the quotes, to indicate a phrase), or for "bicycle and safety" (with no quotes, to indicate a search command, will lead to the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute, which prominently displays a list of mandatory helmet laws and related links.

Comment: Note that search lingo on Yahoo, the directory, is just as important as on search engines. The most powerful is to put phrases in quotes. But be willing to tinker: If "bicycle helmet" doesn't get what you want, try "bicycle helmets."

How do I know this is right? You don't. You will note that the date at the bottom of the page is quite current. But best to check it out before publishing. (Notice how the usual rules are not suspended on the Web.) As the institute warns, "Here are the ones we are aware of as of this date. The States are probably all included, but some localities could be missing. ... This is a difficult page to keep current!" (Funny how that admission enhances credibility.)

How do I attribute this? On deadline, you could attribute this information to the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institue, an advocacy program of the Washington (D.C.) Area Bicyclist Association. (That nugget is at the very bottom of the home page.) With time, and daylight hours, you could check with your state or city.

Question 4 Answer

Answer: Grossman's book is called "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society." He claims to have coined the term, "killology." He has a newer book, "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence." He lives in Jonesboro, Ark., site of a shooting at Westside Middle School.

The questions are up to you, but here are a few: What affect did the Jonesboro experience so close to home have on your theories? You've been an expert witness defending children who have killed; you appear to have complicated feelings about them; are you sympathetic to them, as you are to soldiers? How did your theory develop? Some say you suggest that you understate the willingness of humans to kill; don't we have too many killers, not too few? How have Nintendo and the other game manufacturers reacted to you? You're not a social scientist; why don't you show any uncertainty in your statements? What remedies do you recommend?

How do I find that? You can search for books at Amazon (and other book vendors) by words in the title, and last name of the author. One you find the book, you often can read quick reviews. Here's the search form. Note that the search form on the Amazon home page is quick, but lame. To do a detailed search, you'll want to choose Books, then Book Search. Once you know the name and the name of the book, you can find many references to Grossman's theories on the Web. For help, read the tutorial on Web searching.

Comment: This is an example of how a commercial Web site (Amazon) can be useful for journalists. Note that once you search, Amazon offers to send an E-mail whenever Grossman has a new book; this is a great help for reporters on any subject. Grossman isn't famous, but he's been just public enough to have plenty written about him on the Web. You might, if you had more time, search Newsgroup messages mentioning him, at Google's newsgroup search (formerly Deja.com). And if you send a ProfNet request before you leave for the speech, you might find some professors you could interview after the speech.

How do I know this is right? In this case, we're just looking for enough to go on to ask good questions. A lot of the Web seems to be best for that: Not great for finding answers, but for asking better questions.

How do I attribute this? I would use the book title without attribution, though I have seen some errors in the Amazon book listings. As for the hometown, best to ask Grossman if he still lives there. And a call to the editor of the newspaper in Jonesboro wouldn't be a bad way to gather some background.

Question  5 Answer

Answer: This one comes from a newspaperman or Shakespeare, depending on your point of view. Quotations on the Web can be maddening, because of the many variations and uncertain sourcing. (If you believe the Web, Mark Twain said everything except part of what's in the Bible.)

Yes, "politics makes strange bedfellows," but the phrase is much older. The earliest reference seems to come from Shakespeare. Trinculo, a jester, says in the "The Tempest," "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows." (Act 2, Scene 2)

The politics maxim seems to be correctly ascribed to Charles Dudley Warner, a Connecticut newspaperman. Warner was also a neighbor of Mark Twain, and his collaborator on "The Gilded Age." Many of Warner's best lines are falsely attributed to Twain, including "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."

How do I find that? Step 1: Fortunately, this is an old saying and common, so you can look it up in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The original Bartlett's is now online at Bartleby.com; search for bedfellows. But this Bartlett doesn't tell you which character says the words, or in what context. So you need the full text of Shakespeare's plays.

Step 2: Many people have put Shakespeare online, because he is free of copyright protection. Search in the Yahoo directory for Shakespeare and search and you'll find a good Shakespeare search engine. Search there for bedfellows and you have your quote and the context.

Step 3: Now, on to politics. AltaVista shows about 9,982 references to "strange bedfellows." That number includes 347 references to "politics makes strange bedfellows" and 98 more with a different subject-verb agreement: "politics make strange bedfellows." That's too many to plow through. We can play some hunches -- "mark twain" and "strange bedfellows" or teddy roosevelt... -- but they don't seem to help.

Step 4: So a bit of search engine syntax and guesswork may help. On AltaVista's advanced search page, title:quot* and "politics makes strange bedfellows" limits our search to pages with some form of "quote" or "quotation" in the title, and the full saying anywhere on the page. In other words, it finds our target in the context of pages that are discussing famous quotations. That yields pages that include quotations attributed (correctly or not) to Twain, including ours, and cite Charles Dudley Warner.

Step 5: Now we use what we know. A search for "charles dudley warner" and "politics makes strange bedfellows" finds a few more references. Are we 100 percent sure? No. But we are gathering steam. And one of the pages gives a concrete reference to go on: Charles Dudley Warner, "My Summer in a Garden," Ch 15., 1871. Now we're headed for the library to find that book.

Question  6 Answer

Answer: Melvin J. Gordon is the chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer of Tootsie Roll Industries Inc., the candy company in Chicago. It makes Tootsie Rolls, Junior Mints, Mason Dots, and Sugar Daddy.

The latest company filing is now nearly one year old, but his salary in 1998 was $955,000, and his total cash compensation was $1,885,000, counting a bonus of $930,000. He owned a smidge more than one million shares of stock, and his wife owned 6.5 million shares. Each share of stock is worth about $30, so that makes their paper net worth, in stock, about $225 million. That's a lot of Tootsie Rolls.

His company bio says he was 79 in March 1999, and gives this info: "Director since 1952; Chairman of the Board since 1962; President of HDI Investment Corp., a family investment company." His wife, Ellen R. Gordon, then 67, is President and Chief Director.

How do I find that? You can search by name or phrase within company reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission at 10kWizard.com. (10k Wizard offers a free registration to journalists. Send an e-mail to Elise Soyza, elise@soyza.com.) If you see the name in many reports, you usually want to look at proxy statements for the bios and compensation and stock options of executives; the SEC calls a proxy statement a form 14; usually you will see a DEF14, or definitive proxy statement. Once you know the company, you also can get a quick summary from Hoover's; this will link to the company Web page, financial information, and press releases. And it will give you a current stock quote. On Hoover's you search by name of the company, and then click on "Capsule."

Comment: SEC reports can be complicated, but at least the SEC makes all companies fill them out the same way. So you soon learn that 14 means proxy statement, and that you can use the Edit/Find command in your browser to quickly move through a long document to the "summary compensation table," which is the chart showing executive salaries. Note that the SEC has documents only from public companies (such as Tootsie Roll), not from private companies (such as Mars, makers of M&Ms). Only the largest public companies are listed in Hoovers and similar directories.

How do I know this is right? The SEC passes on the documents just as they are filed by the companies. The information might be wrong, but it's what the companies told the SEC. Remember, though, that the SEC filing is a snapshot. Maybe the company has been sold, or an executive has been sacked. Best to check facts with the company.

How do I attribute this? Usually we say something like "according to the company's public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission." We don't mention 10kWizard or FreeEdgar or the other intermediaries. However, information at Hoovers is more troublesome; it gathers facts from many sources, and can't be entirely up to date on the number of employees or even the names of key executives; I would try not to use any information from Hoovers without checking it out in the SEC filings or with the company.

Question  7 Answer

Answer: The bed and breakfast in Nesbit, Miss., is the Bonne Terre County Inn and Cafe. Its phone number is 662-781-5100. The innkeepers were Max and June Bonnin. Mrs. Bonnin was known as a cancer survivor, who beat Hodgkin's without radiation or chemotherapy.

How do I find that? What do we have to go on? Not much. Bed and breakfast, and Nesbit, Miss. (It's cheating to search for Amtrak or train; there wouldn't have been anything about Amtrak and this victim just after the crash, but there is a lot now!)

Well, how many bed and breakfast inns could there be in Nesbit, Miss.? Try the Yellow Pages. There are lots of Yellow Pages on the Web. An easy one is at Yahoo. First you click on "Yellow Pages," then type in "bed and breakfast," then fill in a city, "Nesbit, MS."

But don't stop there. Once you know the name of the bed and breakfast, you will be able to guess its Web address: http://www.bonneterre.com. And that will lead you to the names of the owners. The names are in several places on the Web site; one place is in the "Southern Living" article linked from the main page; click on the magazine cover.

But don't stop there. If you search for Nesbit on MapQuest, you'll find that it's very near Memphis, Tenn. (Twenty miles south of Memphis by car, according to the MapQuest driving directions.) Perhaps Mrs. Bonnin has been in the news. You can access the archives of the Memphis newspaper, the Commercial Appeal. See the list of U.S. News Archives on the Web from the good people at the Special Libraries Association, or go directly to the Commercial Appeal archives. Don't be discouraged by the $2 cost to read an entire article; for free you'll get enough of each article to see why she was well-known. But make sure to set the search to "all years," so you'll find articles before the crash.

The article that catches the eye there is a 2,800-word article on June Bonnin in the Commercial Appeal, five few months before the Amtrak crash. The headline tells the story, "Woman Rejects Cancer Therapy..." She was fighting Hodgkin's without benefit of chemotherapy or radiation.

Comment: More journalists are following this policy: No name is published without checking it first. Well, that's impractical. But whenever possible, we want to know if the person we're writing about is famous. It's much more fun to include the fame in the first article, not to feel stupid the next day, when the wire story comes over explaining why she is famous. You never know who's going to turn out to be well known, so the only protection is to check every name you can.

How do I know this is right? You certainly wouldn't say who died in a crash without getting confirmation from the family. That's what we got in this case. We started with a careful phone call to the bed and breakfast (Not, "Did anyone there die?" but "I read an Associated Press story today that mentioned a bed and breakfast in Nesbit; was that yours?") An employee confirmed that Mrs. Bonnin had died, gave some information about her and her family, and told us how to reach her husband in Illinois.

How do I attribute this? The information on cancer can be attributed to the Commercial Appeal, if you can't get the same information from the husband by deadline.

Question  8 Answer

Answer: Matt Drudge's phone number is 213-463-1202. (Actually, the area code has changed to 323.)

How do I find that? You can search the database of registered Web sites (domains) at InterNIC's Whois. It's listed on the "Top 100" at Power Reporting.

Comment: Note that you don't search for http://www.drudgereport.com or even for www.drudgereport.com, but only for the registered domain name drudgereport.com at Whois.

How do I know this is right? You don't. If you call the phone number, you'll find that the area code has changed to 323. Re-dial with that area code, and you get a machine with Drudge's voice saying, "This is Matthew Drudge in Los Angeles...." Also, if Drudge doesn't keep paying $35 a year, he'll lose the rights to drudgereport.com. And the bill is sent to the address in the Whois database. So it's likely to be right. But Whois doesn't check the information on newly registered sites, so you will find sites registered to Donald Duck or Pol Pot.

How do I attribute this? If you had to publish the phone number, you could it was listed in a registry of domain names. Or you could be more specific, citing InterNIC's Whois service, a registry of domain names.

Question  9 Answer

Answer: The median age of first marriage has gone up -- but it hasn't gone up uniformly. First it went down, then up. We remember that people used to get married younger. My grandmother remembered that people used to get married older.

Check out the Table MS-2, Estimated Median Age at First Marriage. A lot of history is in this tiny chart: The women's movement. The automobile. The Pill. Education. Health care. Immigration. Workplace rules. Religion.

Note the details: Read from the bottom of the table up. Look at women's ages, in the column on the right. The age went down slowly but steadily from 1890 to 1956, dropping from 22 years to 20.1. Since then, it has been rising rapidly. Recently, however, it has started to level off at 25.0.

What might happen this year is that the age for women may go down for the first time in 40 years.

The difference between men's and women's ages at first marriage has declined significantly, from about 4 years to about 1.5 years. There's a story angle: How low can it go? Why is it declining? Will we reach a point where we lose the societal presumption that grooms are older than brides?

The phone number is 301-457-2465. It's at the bottom of the page, a wonderful thing about the Census. Demographers are standing by. Call that number, and someone will answer, "Fertility!"

How do I find that? A good place to start on such demographic questions is the U.S. Census Bureau. Start with its list of "Subjects A to Z." Dial M for Marriage.

Ignore the disclaimer that the Census doesn't keep every stat related to marriage, and "click here to see the U.S. Census Bureau data." About half way down the page, you'll see Table MS-2, Estimated Median Age at First Marriage.

Remember that it is at http://www.census.gov, not at http://www.census.com. A finer point: Because of the way the Census Bureau has configured its Web servers, http://census.gov won't work; you need http://www.census.gov This is the kind of problem that is impossible to anticipate; when it doesn't work with a "www," try it without; and vice versa.

Comment: Of course, it's not enough to know that something has gone up or gone down; how it got there may be the story. This chart is useful because you can squeeze several story angles out of it, if you focus on different comparisons.

Also, note that the Census is terrific for giving us a long view; what we're sure happened may just reflect what's happened in the past few years.

Finally, this is a story in flux, perhaps reaching a point of significant change; a lot of stories are like that, and the Census is a good place to troll for interesting ones. Start with the list of "Subjects A to Z."

How do I know this is right? These are estimates. And the inside story may be that the Census isn't doing as much collecting of demographic data from the states as it used to. The numbers on median age at first marriage in each state should be available from state agencies. (A hunch: In some states, the age of women's first marriage started falling a couple of years ago, while in other states is continues to rise.)

How do I attribute this? Estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, from information collected by the states.

Question  10 Answer

Answer: The 20 largest school districts vary widely in poverty, from about half the students in Detroit to less than 10 percent in three districts surrounding Washington, D.C. The list: Detroit, 48%; Houston, 41%; NYC, 39%; Los Angeles, 39%; Philadelphia, 36%; Chicago, 35%; Dallas, 34%, Dade County (Miami), Fla., 32%; Memphis, 32%; San Diego, 27%; Hillsborough County, Fla., 22%; Duval County, Fla., 20%; Broward County, Fla., 17%; Orange County, Fla., 17%; Palm Beach County, Fla., 17%; Clark County, Nev., 13%; Hawaii Dept. of Ed., 12%; Prince George's County, Md., 9%; Montgomery County, Md., 7%; Fairfax County, Va., 6%.

Clearly, these school districts aren't all comparable, which is why you would want to sort your state's schools, and even schools in your state of similar size to yours. That's the point of this exercise: to compare items within a peer group.

How do I find that? To import the Web page into Microsoft Excel, you'll first use the Web browser to save the text from the Web page on your hard drive, then use Excel to open the file from your hard drive. This will run Excel's text import wizard, which will help you make sure the information is in nice columns and rows.

This may sound difficult, but it just takes a few minutes to learn, and a couple of minutes to do from then on.

Here are the steps:

1. First, go to the Web page for the poverty file, at http://PowerReporting.com/files/. Scroll down to "poverty" and choose the second file, "poverty.txt." It should open in your Web browser. Be very patient; this is a huge file, with thousands of schools.
2. Check to make sure that you have all the schools from Albertville, AL, to Weston County, WY. If not, reload the page.
3. In your browser, choose File/Save As. (These are the commands in Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer.) Choose a destination (you'll need to remember it!), a file name (say, poverty.txt), and make sure that the type of file is set to "text file." Just calling it poverty.txt doesn't ensure that you have a text file, as opposed to a Web document with fonts and coding and such. You have to choose text from the "save as type" list. Choose "Save" or "OK" to save the file.
4. Now, start Microsoft Excel. File/Open, and find poverty.txt to open it. You'll need to look in the same destination. Excel won't see it there at first, because it will look only for "Microsoft Excel files." Change "files of type" to "all files" or "text files." Once you can see poverty.txt, select it and "Open."
5. Excel will show you the "Text Import Wizard," which will help put the information in clean columns and rows. You're on step 1 of 3 of the text wizard. It will guess that this information is fixed width, which it is: no matter how long Albertville's name is, and how short the next name is, the second column always starts at the same place. Click on "Next."
6. In step 2 of the wizard, you make sure that it has the column breaks where they need to be. Scroll to the right. Make sure that there is a break between each column. It probably will do just fine at this; you're just supervising. You don't need a break after the last column. If you need to add, move, or delete a break, follow the directions. Choose "Next" to move to step three.
7. Step 3 of the wizard isn't important in this example, but you may wonder what it's for. Note that here you could choose to "skip" column two, an ID number that we don't need because we have the district names. You also could choose to set column two to "text" instead of "general," because otherwise Excel will presume that those codes are numbers, and will throw away the leading zeros. Here, you don't care. But if you had ZIP Codes, and some were in Connecticut and started with zero, you would care; you would select the column and choose "text." Now, having done nothing here (except refreshed your understanding of data types), click on "Finish."

Now you have your data in a spreadsheet. You may want to widen the columns so they look prettier. To do this, select the entire sheet (the box just above the 1 and to the left of the A), then double click on the column border between the A and the B. That sets every column to the width of the widest item down the column.

In the first blank column to the right, which is probably column G, put in a headline: "Pct. Poor."

In the first cell below the headline, probably cell G2, put in the formula for the percentage of children in that school who are poor. That would be =F2/E2. Hit the enter or return key to put that formula in the cell. You should see .18208 for Albertville.

Copy that formula down for all schools. To do this, first, select the cell with the formula in it. Then you'll see a little black pimple on the lower right corner of that cell. (OK, it's called the fill handle.) Double click that.

You probably want to display the column as a percentage (18 percent, instead of .18208). To do this, you don't have to multiply by 100. First, select the entire column, by clicking on the column letter G. Then click on the % button. If you don't see that button, you can choose Format/Cells and choose percentage and set the number of decimal places you want to show.

Now, you're ready to sort. Sorting could be a longer lesson here, but in brief:

To compare the largest school districts, you'll want to sort all the schools by size (select one school's number of kids, then use the ZtoA button). Then eyeball the top 20, or select those rows and use Data/Sort to sort them by your new Column G descending, from poorest to not so poor.

Similarly, to compare schools in your state, you would sort all the rows by state, then select and Data/Sort only your state's schools by Column G.

The key concept in sorting is that you are sorting rows by the value in a certain column, not sorting a column. The AtoZ and ZtoA buttons sort the entire sheet by one value; you pick ONE CELL in that column, and use those buttons. The Data/Sort function, however, is the only way to sort only certain rows by a value; you pick all the rows you want to sort, using the ROW NUMBERS, so you get all of the cells in those rows; then you use Data/Sort to tell it what column should be used to determine the order.

Comment: Honest, do this several times, lock it into muscle memory, and you can do it on any set of information in under 10 minutes.

How do I know this is right? This particular set of information, on poverty in schools, is very squishy. A disclaimer and discussion is here.

How do I attribute this? Emphasize that this is an estimate. Don't make anything of small differences between schools. And attribute it to federal estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau.