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Indianapolis Star Factfiles
When I came back to The Indianapolis Star in 2000, I was eager to begin recreating the work I had done in Dayton -- and now I had a larger staff to help me do it. Most notably, Barb Hoffman had previously compiled lists and chronologies on the newsroom ATEX system. For example, there were ATEX files listing all previous Indianapolis mayors, police line-of-duty deaths, death penalty cases, etc. So we started by converting that resource to an internal website and then adding to it the more encyclopedic types of pages I had done in Dayton.
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CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
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BLACK HISTORY
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In Dayton, I was unable to get my work onto the newspaper's public server but as soon as I started building similar pages on the Star's intranet, the director of our online department (Bob Jonason) immediately saw the value we switched it to a public server.
The Star also had about a decade of its archive online, which individuals could subscribe to and pay $2 per article to download. I argued at the time that an archive that shows users nothing but a blank search bar is like a store with nothing on display in the windows nor even on shelves inside. Customers have to guess what might be inside. Does the store sell . . . shoelaces? No? How about furnace filters? Turkey sandwiches? With encyclopedic narratives like these, I reasoned, we're giving users a hundred links to choose from.
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Sept. 11: The Day Everything Changed
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, we started work on a set of pages related to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on that day. One of those pages was a list of those who were killed, which included a handful of people from Indiana. We used the Associated Press list and kept ours updated as AP updated theirs.
I found these pages on the Wayback Machine, but my recollection is that there were additional pages on the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crashes.
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Index and Timeline pages
Two of the entry points into individual Factfile pages. These examples are from about 2001, but they would have changed over time.
This was also during the period in which Gannett had taken all of its newspaper archives down because of a court ruling on how freelance writers were compensated.
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FACTFILES INDEX PAGE
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TIMELINES
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Here are links, in no precise order, to all of the Factfiles for which I was able to find screenshots through the Wayback Machine.
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