10 questions: Margot Williams: a 24-hour news cycle and competition from other news outlets keep Margot Williams busy helping reporters at the New York times meet the paper's high standards for accuracy and thoroughness.

Margot Williams has been part of the changing media landscape pitting newspapers against the Internet and other online influences. She is a database research editor with The New York Times and for the last five years has been part of a computer-assisted reporting team at the Times' city desk.

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Ten years ago she won the Pulitzer Prize for public service at The Washington Post for an investigative team project on the deadly force shooting of civilians in Washington, D.C. Her work in helping the Post report on the war on terrorism led to another Pulitzer for national reporting

Margot graduated from the City College of New York and received a master's degree in library and information science from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is the co-author of two books: Great Scouts! CyberGuides for Subject Searching on the Web (1999) and Cuba from Columbus to Castro (1981). She is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).

Q: Tell me about your Pulitzer Prizes.

The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize board's Gold Medal for public service for a November 1998 five-part series examining the unusually high rate of police shootings in the District of Columbia. According to the Post, "The series, the result of nearly a year's work by a team of 15 reporters, computer analysts, graphic artists and editors, produced a swift and intense reaction. The Justice Department was called in to investigate the handling of the local shootings, and D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey ordered new firearms training for all 3,500 members of the force."

I was one of two researchers involved in the story, the other being Alice Crites. My major task on this project was creating a database of D.C. Superior Court cases involving the civilian victims of police shootings. The data were collected through a joint team effort at the courthouse that required pulling and reading hundreds of cases. The information from the cases was entered, compiled and ultimately used for research and analysis. I was also involved in a variety of research assignments relating to this project for almost a year. It was a great privilege to work with these superb journalists.

I was also on a team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting of the war on terrorism. In this effort, I was a member of a team that included Bob Woodward. I have to say that every prize that I have ever been involved with has been a team project, so it's not like the Pulitzer Prize is in my name. In order to get recognized, you have to have your name on the story somehow when it appears in print. In all my years in news librarianship, we'd have to fight to get credit on a story. That's the first step, and that's how it came about that researchers became part of Pulitzer Prize-winning teams.

Q: Now you're at The New York Times. What's a day in your life like?

I sit in the metro section, known as New York. I sit with the reporters, near the editors of the city desk, and I work on projects around the newsroom. I'm not in the research library--I'm a member of the computer-assisted reporting team. In every other job I was in the news library, but in a lot of newsrooms, people are extending their skills to fit into various news-gathering practices. I made an effort to extend my skills to incorporate the tools of computer-assisted reporting, using software tools like spreadsheets and database management. I can organize news information so that it can be used in storytelling and news reporting.

Q: Could you give me an example?

The computer-assisted reporting team has eight reporters, and most of them are highly skilled, but the kind of thing we do is obtain databases directly from government agencies and analyze them ourselves rather than take reports the government provides and accept their statistics and conclusions. We take the raw data and analyze the information ourselves. For example, when the passenger plane crashed in the Hudson River, we had the Federal Aviation Administration's database on service difficulty reports and could look to see what kinds of accidents that type of plane had been in or what kind of problems it had had before.

We use databases whenever they are involved in a story. We typically obtain data with something in mind, but we gather all sorts of data, bring it in house and massage it so the reporters can use it to look things up. Part of our job is negotiating with government agencies--what they'll release to us and in what format. Of course, in some cases, they don't hand over some parts of the information and we have to fight for them under the Freedom of Information Act.

Q: It sounds as though you're working on multiple projects at any one time.

Our role--both that of the library and the computer-assisted team--makes it necessary to work with various teams and people throughout the newsroom. I may have four or five projects that I'm working on with different people, so I try to manage my time, check in with them to see where we are on those projects, and check in with my own team, because I am a manager of a very small team of one computer-assisted reporter in the Metro section and another in the Washington bureau. It's a concentric circle with my people and my own research for stories.

What makes this the most exciting job is that you may have to drop everything because something is breaking, like when a plane suddenly lands in the Hudson River. Whatever you're doing just goes away and everyone jumps on it and works as fast as they can. In the past, you would work as fast as you could until the hour when the paper went to press, and then you could stop. But today we update constantly on the Web, so there can be things to do after the press deadline, or early in the morning, or any time of the day.

Q: You have new competitors now because of the Internet.

That's right. The news cycle doesn't end as it used to because we're competing with other news outlets. We also have journalists coming up who were taught to use technology compared to those who came up many, many years ago, so we do a lot of training on electronic research tools. We have to. We also show people how to use spread-sheets and databases, such as internal databases, or we have them look on Facebook or use Twitter.

We are asking ourselves, What are the new sources of information? We have a lot of ongoing training, teaching reporters to do things they have never done before, such as creating PDFs from Word documents. We still have researchers at The New York Times--six or eight--but we are moving away from our book library toward electronic resources that can be distributed and shared on our network.

Q: What was your job at The Washington Post.

I was research editor--the head of the researchers--and I was there 14 years. I moved out to the Metro desk as researcher and coordinator of resources and then went back to the library as library director and research editor. I then moved to The New York Times because New York is home, and I'm happy to be home.

Q: What you're doing at the Times is revolutionary and becoming commonplace.

We now have a newer team, which has been putting up these great databases and other cool things on the Web site. They're software engineers and journalists. My particular niche is creating smaller databases of research-based information, in particular about terrorism suspects, detainees in the global war on terror, and so on.

For example, one of my databases on detainees at Guantanamo is online, and we were able to convert all our documents that were released to the public. Some 16,000 pages that were in unsearchable PDFs were converted into searchable text, and we connected them to each of the detainees. I put all that information in there, and now it's aggregated and can be displayed in a number of ways that the public can view. It's part of our competitiveness.

Q: You have no choice but to do things like that. Newspapers are dying. You need to reach the mobile user.

That's part of the experiment with the business model. For me--and I care about the business model--I can vouch for how I put that information out there. There are others who do the same, like Wikipedia, but I think ours is better and sourced. We are held to standards.

All that we have is our credibility. We try very hard to get things right, and that's why we still have researchers in the library. Our bosses know they need to have people get things right. Our researchers know how to check themselves out.

Q: How did you get involved with SLA?

I joined SLA in library school. I went to Pratt, which is a library school. People were learning legal librarianship and medical librarianship, etc. But then I went to my first conference, in 1987, and that's when I was with Time, Inc. research. I know I haven't been a member the entire time. I'm also a member of IRE. A lot of members of Newslib are members of IRE.

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The SLA News Division is a great division, with many programs that are a lot of fun. My friend Nora Paul is an active member, and we wrote a book together, Great Scouts! CyberGuides for Subject Searching on the Web, 10 years ago.

Q: What are the hot topics today among news librarians?

The most active discussion is about the fact that our membership is dropping because our members are losing their jobs from cutbacks. So many news libraries are closing or have closed, such as The Wall Street Journal research library--it closed in March, if you can believe that. And newspapers themselves are shutting down and moving to the Web, but that shouldn't keep them from having a library.

What is happening now is that people think they can do the research themselves. For me, the precision has to be right. What we're seeing now is broad-scope searching--there's so much information available that you can find. But the fact is, search engines have not gotten the precision down, and that's what it's about for me.

The other hot topic is the organization of information; it's not that organized. It's just out there, but available only in keyword searching. But subject organization is falling by the wayside, and that's where special librarians' strength lies--in organizing information and the value in having an archive that will be there in the future. We are also good at collaborating with people in providing a service, and often information is not provided as a service but considered a quest or something.

Postscript: As this issue was going to press, Information Outlook learned that Margot Williams was leaving The New York Times to join longtime investigative journalists Sue Schmidt and Glenn Simpson in their new consulting firm, SNS Global LLC, as director of research. The company provides intelligence-gathering, analytic and strategic advisory services. SLA colleagues who wish to stay in touch with Margot may contact her at [e-mail].

Name: Margot Williams

Joined SLA: "Hmm ... either as a student in 1977 or as a professional in the mid-1980s (I went to the Denver conference in 1987)."

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Current Status: Director of Research for SNS Global LLC

Experience: 28 years

Education: MSLS from the Pratt Institute

First Job: The role of Peaseblossom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the New York Shakespeare Festival

First LIS Job: Library Technical Assistant at the New York Public Library Systems Analysis and Data Processing Office

Biggest Challenge Today: Keeping up with the speed of technological innovation

FORREST GLENN SPENCER is an independent information professional based in Baltimore. He can be reached at [e-mail]

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