I was hosting a radio talk show in Vegas on October 1, 2017. It was a morning show, so I was asleep by 10pm. When I woke up at 5am, my kids and I gawked over the news that 52 people were killed while we were sleeping (it would rise to 58). And I had to talk about it on the air.
I'm proud of the work we did that day, but a small public radio station was no match for the data capacities of the New York Times. It was this video (linked) that made me interested in doing investigative data work. I have been working with data my entire career - using spreadsheets and sometimes databases - but I had not realized the sheer number of tools and imaginative storytelling techniques had grown up around me. This video is simply stunning. And it is an example of what journalists can get from crowdsourcing.
Roughly 20,000 people were at the Route 91 Harvest festival that night. Many were taking videos - as we do at events. When the shooting started, many of those videos turned horrific. The Times put out a call for people to share their videos. Then they took 30 of them and created a timeline of the events, in video form.
The video starts out with quick cuts of still pictures of people in panic. The speed of the cuts and content of the pictures conveys the madness of the moment.
The Times editors lined up the sound of gunfire in the videos, then used the hour, minute and second data from the videos to figure out when the shooting started and the patterns of shooting. What they found is that there were 12 bursts of gunfire in the roughly 10 minutes the shooter was active before killing himself as the police burst through the door of his hotel room, across the street from the outdoor festival.
Between each burst, there were lulls, allowing people to escape. This gave us a sense of how many rifles he had, how much ammunition he had, and whether or not the rifles were all working. Also, listening to the rapidity of the gunfire allowed investigators to ascertain that he was using an enhancer - in this case a bump stock - to increase his firing speed.
I've rewatched the first minute of the video so that I could write this, but honestly, I can't watch the rest. Hearing the stories as I did covering it was enough. But it is a fascinating video, which I watched eagerly when it came out, and I was still ensconced in trying to collect info and not feel anything.