College of Media

Publishable or not?: A tale of the facts

By William Gaines

A good investigative reporter must always allow the facts to prevail over a good story. That is exactly what students in my Univeristy of Illinois investigative journalism class learned after digging deeply into whether or not the University was wasting million of dollars by providing straight-in parking spaces instead of spaces on a diagonal.

After a lengthy investigation that included mathematical formulas, tape measuring, piles of maps, interviews with parking lot architects and even aerial photos, the students concluded that our original hypothesis was wrong and that the University had, in fact, drawn its parking lot lines quite efficiently.

So the students and I killed their story.

They were not upset. Jon Hansen, a junior in the College of Media, saw it this way, “I think it is important to have those experiences you would have in the real world of journalism even though you might not always get what you want.”

In the real world of investigative journalism, reporters often spend long hours digging and sifting through the facts to follow up on a tip, only to find out that the tip was wrong. The UI class does real-world investigations so they also can discover when stories are not there.

The story of the non-story began when students and I questioned whether the simple redrawing of lines on the pavement to convert the University's 147 parking lots to diagonal parking would create more parking spaces for which the University could charge fees. With angled parking, the students quickly learned, a 12-foot-wide driveway is all that is needed between rows of cars instead of the 20 feet for turning space for straight-in, 90-degree parking. On the surface, that seemed to indicate that redrawing parking space lines would create more spaces.

Journalism student Paul Rotter supported the premise in an algebraic formula he developed. In some lots, his formula predicted, about 25 percent more car rows could be created. For instance, it appeared that Lot E-12 at Sixth Street and Armory Drive could contain 14 rows instead of 11.

The students organized a pilot plan to learn if they could confirm the conclusion, which is always a wise procedure when setting up an investigative project. They found parking lot design experts, and they got maps, aerial photos, previous studies and newspaper stories about the parking facilities — and a tape measure.

Student Yesenia Mojarro researched the public record and found plans for a City of Champaign municipal lot that had been improved and converted to angled parking this year. She discovered the spaces had increased from 192 to 207. That only 15 spaces were added to so large a lot was a surprise, but the students and I surmised that the lot contours had somehow limited the increase.

Then a counter argument surfaced. Contrary to our premise, parking lot experts from around the country were telling student interviewers that straight-in parking could actually pack in more cars than angled parking. We thought we knew better from our own work. In a class discussion, we decided they must have been referring to smaller lots, such as those at convenience stores.

Students had each produced an outline for the project, discussed how it would be written and settled on a headline that would read something like, “New Angles for Campus Parking.”

We learned that the University has a program to eliminate what they call surface lots and replace them with high-rise structures. Perhaps our diagonal parking plan would make some of those multi-million-dollar parking structures unnecessary. We became wastewatchers on a mission.

What we needed was on-the-scene observation. A student team of Nick Fawell, Emily Waldheim and Dan Farnham paced off, counted and measured each parking slot in Lot E-12 and then compared that information with our angled-parking plans. The students were surprised to learn that we could add only two cars to the lot. This hardly seemed like a thrilling headline.

Our error in judgment: We had not considered that slanted parking takes more width to the stalls and therefore allows fewer parking slots to each row than direct-in parking. Each car space at a 45-degree angle would have to be 12.7 feet at the mouth instead of nine feet for straight-in parking. The wider stalls are needed because a driver has to cut the wheel sooner to back into the narrower driveway we would have created.

Also, unusable space is created at each end of a row because of the slant. Think of this way: The cars are like books on a shelf that are slanted against the sides of the bookcase. When straightened, much more space is available for the books.

The students were reluctant to give up on what had seemed like a good story, but a further study of the large E-14 lot near the Assembly Hall also showed an insignificant number of new spaces created with a diagonal parking plan. Finally, systematic investigation and the facts won out, and we killed the story.

I had experienced similar outcomes in my years as an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune. The most memorable was an investigation of faulty auto shock absorbers.

the Tribune consulted an expert automotive engineer who established that shock absorbers for new cars were shoddy and flimsy. We were ready to come to the aid of consumers, and we set out to find serious auto crashes caused by faulty shock absorbers. There were none. It was quite the opposite. We found that the better the shock absorbers, the less control the driver had in a crisis. We had no story of consumer abuse.

But no story or not, and whether about shock absorbers or parking places, we believed we had done our job properly.

Good journalism requires thorough research and reporting — and level-headed judgment about when there are facts enough to publish and when there are not.