Stephen Busemeyer has worked as a journalist for over 30 years. Today, he is the managing editor at the Connecticut Mirror and the University’s current Koeppel Journalism Fellow; his introductory data journalism course attracts everyone from STEM students to Argus writers. This month, The Argus sat down with Busemeyer to discuss his early years as a reporter, holding the government accountable, and the role of emerging AI technology in journalism.
The Argus: How did you discover data journalism? What brought you to this career?
Stephen Busemeyer: You know how there’s always one person in the room who knows how to work the printer or unjam the copy machine? That was always me. Years ago, when I was an editor at the Hartford Courant, the managing editor had an idea. On the front page of USA Today every day, they had a little statistical item, just some dumb, random statistic. So the managing editor said, “Hey, I think it would be a great idea to do something like that in the Hartford Courant. Let’s ask Bus; he knows how computers work.”
So, I started this weekly column called CT Stats. This was probably in 2005, 2006, so it was before there was any good software. The best websites were where you click on a link and get text. So I did this weekly statistic on Connecticut. The first one I did was: How many leaves are there on a tree in Connecticut? And I called somebody at the Agricultural Extension office. They went out into the woods and collected thousands and thousands of leaves in bags. They took a thousand birch leaves and weighed them to get an average birch leaf weight, and maple leaves and oak leaves, and so on. And they did the math, and they came up with 72,000 some odd leaves per tree on average in Connecticut. I was kind of hooked after that.
I was basically self-taught in this very rudimentary way. Just here’s a spreadsheet; find a story in the data. Find a stat that’s relevant to the news. What’s the story in the data? And that’s what I ask my students. That’s what I ask my reporters every day, when we’re looking at election returns or whatever it happens to be. There are all kinds of ways to present data interactively to the readers. Finding the story of the data is ultimately about getting the readers closer to public policy, closer to understanding what’s going on in the world, and giving them that other avenue instead of just words.
A: How has the rise of technology changed the nature of your journalistic work?
SB: In very important ways, it hasn’t changed. The story’s the same: what’s the story in the data? I worked on a team at the Courant that looked at the 2000 decennial census. We found some stories in the data, and we wrote 10 different stories about them. And then as time went on, I had a program that let people get interactive with the data to see how many people were in their town this year, or what the population increase was in their town. The data tells the same story; you can just access it in a different way, make it a little bit easier for the readers. The goal of journalism is to let you ask more.
A: What kinds of stories do you enjoy covering most?
SB: I love catching bad guys, especially dirty cops. Sometimes that is a data story. The movie “Spotlight” is about how the Boston Globe broke the story about the Catholic Church shuffling around predatory priests. It was a data journalism story. They looked through rosters of where priests were relocated. I thought that maybe it was possible that Connecticut did the same thing with police officers who were not necessarily fit for duty and had a bunch of disciplinary issues in their personnel file. Maybe they got quietly shuffled from department to department. So we looked at it as a data question. There is something in Connecticut called the Post Police Officer Standards and Training, and they file forms every time a police officer is moved into or moved out of a specific department. It’s the same thing as “Spotlight,” when they’re looking at the priests who are moved around different parishes. We did not find a big pattern of behavior. We found a few police officers who were clearly moved around because no department could deal with them after a while, but not enough to do a big statewide policy story saying Connecticut’s got to get its act together because all these bad things are happening. I love doing stories like that, finding out the things that people don’t want to be found out and sharing them with the world.
For years, the state had an obligation to print and report all the unclaimed property that it collected that belonged to its citizens, and it did that by taking out massive advertisements in the newspaper that listed everybody who was owed money by the state of Connecticut. The problem was that the list ran into millions of people, and most of the people were only owed one cent or two cents. The legislature changed the law so that anybody who was owed under 50 bucks wouldn’t have to be printed. This goes on for years. Newspapers evolve, and the internet shows up. The Treasury Department starts posting this list online. They got the law changed. On the State Treasurer’s website, you could search for your name, and if the state owed you money, they would send you a check unless it was $50 or less. They still didn’t report on $50 or less. We find this out. We believe there could be millions of dollars the state is keeping in its pocket.
Eventually, we got them to print out a list of everyone who was owed any amount of money. Guess how many pages the PDF was, how many names per page? How about a 330,000 page PDF? We returned millions and millions of dollars to state taxpayers, who before the story, had no way to see if they were owed money. I was owed $10.47 and got it back. That’s the kind of story I love to see.
A: How much has AI changed the journalistic landscape? How much of a role is it playing in your work, and how much of a role do you believe it should play?
SB: We are aggressively adopting AI in the “Connecticut Mirror” newsroom. We use it daily, not to write stories, but to do simpler tasks, like asking it to scrape my website to give me a list of stories we published today. I had a couple of PDFs that I needed scraped last night, and I just dumped them into ChatGPT. There are 169 towns in Connecticut, each with their own governments. If we want to know if there are similar issues being discussed in each town, we can’t go to every meeting. But I can ask ChatGPT to look at all of them. We’re using it as much as possible. We’d be silly not to, and all of journalism should be going that way.
A: How do you navigate your various roles—managing editor, reporter, and professor—at once?
SB: I’ve been teaching on and off since 1993 when I was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado. I taught public speaking and organizational communication. I left for journalism and reporting. A lot of it is just asking questions and thinking clearly. Any sort of writing is pursuing a theory, pursuing a hypothesis. You need the clarity of thought to figure out exactly what you’re doing, how to structure a study, a research project, anything like that. Even abstract writing is the same as writing a story, writing a piece of code. Then, in a way, teaching in a classroom, the performance art part of it is similar. Every night I have a narrative arc. I like teaching. It’s been one of the best parts of my professional career. It’s the same reason I’m in journalism: I have found something out about the world, and I want you to know about it.
A: What advice would you give to aspiring journalists at the University? Is the industry harder to break into than it once was?
SB: It’s extraordinarily difficult, but it’s also exactly the same. Journalism has always been about finding things out that nobody knows and writing it down. The industry has changed; obviously, there are many fewer newspapers. Attention is under more pressure than ever before from the unbelievable amount of channels that we’re all forced to deal with. Social media takes up a lot of time. Life takes up a lot of time. Competing for people’s attention is tough.
It’s difficult to expect a college student like you, or a mom with two kids, a dad with two kids, trying to navigate life, trying to keep the house in one piece, trying to keep the cars running, trying to take care of their children, trying to keep their relationship intact, trying to keep up with national politics, being bombarded with all these opinions, and then being asked to vote in your municipal election on issues that you have you have no idea about: That is hard. Our challenge as journalists, more than ever, is to make news as easy as we can. That means mastering social media, having video chops, having audio chops, and understanding your audience.
A: You’ve worked for decades as a journalist in Connecticut, but you also had stints at newspapers in Wyoming and Colorado. What were those experiences like? What differences have you observed when reporting within varying political contexts?
SB: Reporters, by nature, have certain biases. They think it’s good for people to know things, and they abhor authoritative governmental figures. We take our watchdog role seriously; that naturally will bring you a bunch of malcontents as reporters: people who are more willing to challenge authority.
In my very small newsroom in Colorado with four reporters, we didn’t really talk about politics that much among ourselves. And it was the mid-90s, Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House. Politics was a kind of a different situation back then. There were a lot of very religious folks in northwest Colorado, including a lot of the presence of the Mormon church, and a lot of Christian church folks. There was a very strong Republican Party, a lot of guns, a lot of beef, kind of what you would expect. But the tenor was much different than what it is today. Everybody got along. Everybody’s cattle had the same problems. And if your cow was having trouble, everybody went and held your cow. I think the sense of community out west was always very strong.
My time in Wyoming was colored by the murder of Matthew Shepard. He was a young gay kid who went to the University of Wyoming. That was a real turning point that led to a lot of hate crimes legislation. At that moment, the Casper Star Tribune, which was known as a fairly loyal paper and fairly conservative, put its editorial neck out there a little bit. But there was no pushback. There were no death threats or anything like that. Politics was—it was okay. Everybody had political differences: You went to this church, they went to that church, they rooted for the Broncos and you rooted for this other team. Of course, we all had differences, but not so much compared to the huge differences today.
A: Who’s the most interesting person you’ve interviewed and why?
SB: I can’t categorically say that he was the most interesting, but it was a very interesting interview: John Kasich. He was a Republican, one of the people who ran against Trump.
This is when I was on the editorial board at the Hartford Courant. He was one of the candidates who stopped in to be interviewed by us. This tells you how quickly things have changed since then. Not even ten years ago, political candidates visited editorial boards, and editorial boards took their role very seriously, vetting candidates, asking hard questions, and making endorsements and recommendations. Kasich was interesting. He was a Republican, but he wasn’t a Tea Party Republican. He was very thoughtful, very smart, and very decisive. One of those guys that made me think, “Oh, maybe this guy’s got the sauce that could make a good president.”
Al Gore Jr. was an interesting interviewee. He wrote to Tesla to argue that Connecticut should have different laws regarding direct sales to consumers. You can’t buy a Tesla in Connecticut directly. You have to go to New York in Connecticut: There’s a law here with your dealers. And he and somebody from Tesla came by to argue that it was bullshit. I think I editorialized in their favor, actually. He was funny. I made him laugh.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lula Konner can be reached at lkonner@wesleyan.edu.
Chloe Rappaport Crowther can be reached at crappaportcr@wesleyan.edu.
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