By MAX OLSON
J Alumni News staff
Matt Waite
The white certificate for a 2009 Pulitzer Prize hangs on the wall above the desk in Matt Waite’s basement office in Lincoln. Though he’s looked up at the Pulitzer hundreds of times, Waite still has a hard time understanding what it means to him.
He has no interest in wasting time admiring the prized certificate.
“I was raised to work hard and keep going,” Waite said. “Awards are nice, and they’ll come along if you work hard, but you just keep going. When you look back on it is when you retire.”
Waite, a 1997 J school graduate who works for the St. Petersburg Times, was part of a team that nabbed the top honor in journalism for his work in building PolitiFact, a Web program designed to hold presidential candidates and other political players accountable by fact-checking statements made on the campaign trail.
“It’s one thing to have an idea on paper, but Matt was the guy who really made it happen,” PolitiFact editor Bill Adair said. “He’s a rare talent in journalism because he is first a great reporter, but he’s also someone who understands the technology and can translate journalism into computer ventures.”
Big idea; no guaranteed success
Waite and seven other Times staff members didn’t envision winning a Pulitzer when they began the PolitiFact project in May 2007.
“We’d sit at the bar and say, ‘Either we’ve got something incredible here, or we’re pissing our careers away,’” he said. “When do you stop and realize the enormity of it all? I haven’t. It still doesn’t seem real.”
On Sept. 30, the White House’s official blog cited PolitiFact when attacking Fox News personality Glenn Beck for false statements he made against President Barack Obama. Waite is beginning to learn that such attention comes with the prominence of his creation.
“I wouldn’t say we went from the minors to the majors, but … it was kind of like the secret was out.”
After the presidential election season, PolitiFact began using its “Obameter” to hold the Obama administration accountable for more than 500 campaign promises. The PolitiFact staff has invested more and more time each day analyzing statements made on the issue of health care reform.
“The beautiful and terrible part about Web sites is things never get dry on you,” Waite said. “You build something and you can build more. You can expand on it. We’re always looking at what’s now, what can we be doing and adding and what’s next.”
Among the improvements on the way for PolitiFact, Waite said, is making the site more relevant to the Times’ readership area. The paper also hopes soon to introduce a more localized version of its fact-checker.
“What about city hall? What about the governor’s mansion? We’ve talked about that for a long, long time,” Waite said. “That’s going to happen. We already have a reporter assigned to it, but it’s tough when you have 27 municipalities within our circulation.”
Learning to telecommute
Waite’s work on projects for the Times continues, but he no longer works in the paper’s offices. Instead, Waite has returned to Lincoln after nearly 10 years in Florida.
Family interests brought Waite back to Lincoln this year. Waite grew up in Blair, Neb., and his wife, Nancy, is a Columbus native. Both agreed they wanted to be closer to their relatives while raising their two children.
The move hasn’t slowed him down. Waite has worked to create several computer-aided reporting projects for the Times since the release of PolitiFact.
“Mug Shots,” which launched in 2009, compiles booking photos and profiles of criminals from four Florida counties. The site also provides statistical breakdowns of its criminal suspects — for example, 75 percent of people arrested in the past 60 days are male.
“We are exposing the machinery of criminal justice and letting the public see the rubber meet the road,” Waite said. “It’s the quintessential do-more-with-less: It requires no human intervention at all and has a substantial audience.”
Waite also built a database for the Times’ high-school sports coverage that allows readers to search for players and their stats, photos and videos. On “Home Team,” players are tracked across sports, school and year and have the stories about them linked to their profiles.
“We’re seeing three times the traffic to our high-school sports content that we did the year prior with the old method,” Waite said. “Parents are paying an obscene amount of attention to these things.”
Entrepreneurship in action
Waite has also co-founded a media technology firm, Hot Type Consulting, with investigative reporter Chase Davis. Davis works for the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch project and previously worked as a computer-aided reporter for The Des Moines Register.
The two are doing Web development for start-ups and nonprofit journalism organizations and spend their time building sites and data-driven projects.
“That’s what I do in my spare time: I build more Web sites,” Waite said with a laugh.
He is also scheduled to put his skills to work teaching a class at the J school in fall 2010 titled “Developing New Media.”
Adair said Waite’s return to Nebraska hasn’t forced the PolitiFact team to make any changes thus far.
“We joke that we’re now the only Florida newspaper with a bureau in Lincoln, Neb.,” Adair said. Because Waite does all his work for the Times online, Adair said Waite’s move to Lincoln “hasn’t been a problem.”
Waite said the Pulitzer — the first award given to a paper for Web content — has undoubtedly sparked more interest in computer-aided reporting in newsrooms across the nation.
He has little sympathy for those papers that aren’t willing to place a greater emphasis on the medium.
“The goal post has moved. The base level of knowledge has changed,” Waite said. “If you don’t know how to use Excel, you’re behind everyone else. Nobody’s really taking that next leap to making a database.”
Though he’s long been an evangelist for database reporting, Waite is tired of propping up its methods. Papers can adopt it, he said, or suffer the consequences.
“I used to go around the country and speak at conferences and say, ‘You’ve got to learn this and try this,’” Waite said. “Now, I’m kind of like, ‘I’ve led you to water.’ I’m sorry, but there comes a point when the dinosaurs have to die. Maybe we’re at that time.”
Early adopter
J school associate professor Joe Starita said he began to understand Waite’s passion for computer-aided reporting in Starita’s depth-reporting course in 1996. Waite built a system that analyzed years of police data to assess which Lincoln neighborhoods had the most significant problems with crime, and he gave the program to Lincoln police chief Tom Casady when he was finished with it.
“Early on, it was clear Matt had the ability to chomp on huge bites of information and chew them without gagging,” Starita said. “It ended up being a hellaciously good story.”
Waite earned a Hearst Award for the story that grew out of the database, and Starita knew that the honor was just the beginning for Waite.
“For a teacher, he was one of those kids that made you want to enter class each day and stay,” Starita said.
For Waite, the learning never stops. He’s constantly scouring technology blogs and other writing in an effort to learn more and find new ideas.
Sure, he won a Pulitzer, but that’s not good enough for Matt Waite. He won’t settle and become complacent.
“I’ve met a bunch of people in my career who won Pulitzers and it went to their head,” Waite said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to end up like that.”
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