Cloutier is a digital reporter at BostonGlobe.com. She was a student at the University of Southern California graduate program in journalism from 2009 to 2011 after earning her undergraduate degree from Boston College in 2009. She worked for a year in Erie, Pennsylvania, then got a job at the Boston Globe.

DL: So why did you choose journalism?

Cloutier: I really wanted to do something that was writing-focused. I considered law and academia, but I wanted to do something more creative, so that led me more toward journalism. I didn’t decide until my senior year of college what I really wanted to do, and that’s part of why I went to grad school: I didn’t have the internships or the experience. I was very late to the game.

DL: Did you have an experience that triggered that, or did it just dawn on you?

Cloutier: I wrote for the student newspaper. I dabbled in it a little. I wasn’t on the staff, not like the people who are editor-in-chief. I wrote a few stories. I’d done a couple of broadcast internships in college, and I knew that I didn’t want to do broadcast writing but I felt that was a good direction. It was kind of a gamble: I applied to journalism schools and jobs. USC-Annenberg gave me a fellowship to go there, so for me it was a good opportunity to learn a new skill set and not have to pay. And I got to move to LA from New England. It was a complete life change. I loved LA. It was a great experience that way, in that it opened my worldview a lot, too. I reported a lot about South Central, so it gave me a passion that I didn’t have, which is writing about poverty and the issues associated around it. I try to do that as much as I can in my current job. I don’t do it all the time, but it’s always great when you can write a story that fits that mindset.

DL: You graduated from USC three years ago. Can you tell me what skill sets you developed in the program?

Cloutier: I can write a basic news story. One thing I always felt is that I didn’t get enough feedback. Others got more, and I felt like I needed more; I am getting it now in the professional workforce, especially at The Globe. The editing process is a lot more intense.

I can edit video in Avid and Final Cut. I can edit audio in Audacity and Audition. I can do audio slideshows, which I’ve never done. A misconception in journalism academia is that people do audio slideshows. I can do basic HTML and CSS. I can build a basic website using WordPress and adjusting templates to certain specifications. Infographics in Illustrator and Photoshop. It was a wide range of tech skills, but I was in the online journalism track. Had I not been, I probably would have had fewer online journalism skills coming out.

DL: Talk to me about getting a job.

Cloutier: Following graduation in May, I did the News21 fellowship, which was fantastic. At the time, I didn’t really appreciate it. Looking back, I got to spend 10 weeks writing one story. I had development resources to make the interactive graphics I needed. Then I moved back to the East Coast because I didn’t foresee myself getting a job in LA because I didn’t want to enter the Hollywood entertainment industry sector and that’s a lot of what is there. I moved back to Maine. I wrote my master’s thesis.

DL: What was your thesis?

Cloutier: I wrote about Watts. It was a multimedia thesis, and I built a website and created a bunch of stories about Watts and some of the changes that have gone on there in the recent years, especially around the housing project. I was very inspired by my work at Intersections [a USC news site covering South Los Angeles] because we covered Watts.

DL: You must have spent an enormous amount of time there and gotten to know people well.

Cloutier: I came out of graduate school with community journalism skills, which a lot of students don’t. To think about questions like: Where are our readers, what do they need from us, what is the best way for us to get the news to them, and also how do we help them tell their own stories? That was a huge emphasis at Intersections. It was almost a twofold project: 1. We write about the community, and 2. We encourage the community members to write about their own communities. I think this made me a little more attractive.

Coming out of News21, I was interviewed for the position I later got at The Globe. The only reason I got interviewed was because of that skill. It was for The Globe’s hyperlocal initiative, which is no longer in existence. My future boss was impressed that I had the experience of working in the community like that. For me, that was a great thing that Annenberg gave me. Intersections is a lot smaller compared to some of the other student news organizations, but it definitely offers a different experience.

DL: So you didn’t get the job the first time?

Cloutier: No, I went to Erie, Pennsylvania. I applied and I heard from them, went there and interviewed. I thought of it as good interview experience even if I didn’t get the job. They offered me the job after my interview. I didn’t even have the time to really think about whether I wanted it. I had another position that I was also in talks with. I ended up taking it, mostly because I had $100 in my bank account and needed a job. It had been six weeks since News21 ended; that’s not a huge lull but still enough. So I moved to Erie.

It was a great experience. Actually, I shouldn’t say that; that’s a way too positive way to put it. As a 24-year-old who had just moved from LA to Erie, it was not a great place to be. As a job, it had its ups and down. The down was that I worked from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. covering crime and breaking news in the early morning hours. But at 8 o’clock, my job changed when the regular crime reporter came in, and I was able to experiment a little more. I did multimedia projects and I did everything myself, which is where those Annenberg skills came in handy. I used fusion tables and made interactive maps, which were my introduction to data journalism, which is what I do now. I was also able to train the newsroom in certain skills they didn’t have, like Twitter and Facebook.

DL: You trained the newsroom in Twitter?

Cloutier: I sat down with every reporter and helped them set up a Twitter account. This was in 2011-2012.

DL: How big was the newsroom?

Cloutier: Twenty news reporters, probably 100 total.

DL: You got up at 4 a.m. and did what?

Cloutier: I made 30 police calls every morning. I went out if there was a car accident or fire. Mostly it was car accidents and fires.

DL: How long were you there?

Cloutier: A year and three months.

DL: When did you start looking for a new job?

Cloutier: Eleven months. I said I would be there a year. I came to ONA [the Online News Association conference] in San Francisco. I had three interviews in three days, and I was on it. I wanted to go. I had a job at The [Washington] Post that I had a few interviews for and didn’t get. I was upset after that happened and contacted David Dahl, who had interviewed me the first time for The Globe job. He said they had an opening and I should apply for it, so that’s how I got the job.

DL: Three months after you did that, you moved. What assignment did you get?

Cloutier: Right now, I’m a data producer. When I first went to The Globe, I was a producer for the hyperlocal initiative. We had 150 sites, mostly aggregated, but we maintained those and did local news coverage. When they split up the two sites, my position at Boston.com no longer existed.

DL: Did you think you were going to be out of a job?

Cloutier: I knew they wouldn’t fire me because we were all at the same union seniority level, so there were others they would have to lay off before me. I was concerned about what my job would become. That was a huge consideration and very stressful. I was assigned to be a data journalist for BostonGlobe.com; the reason for that was that when we were working for Boston.com, our boss allowed us to go outside of our job description and work with Matt Carroll, who is a data reporter, and Alvin Chang, who was a news app developer. We did one called Dream Town Finder, matching people’s priorities with where they should live in Massachusetts based on data. We got to have a little more fun. I think the bosses wanted that for BostonGlobe.com instead of Boston.com. They moved us over in March. It’s been an uphill battle since then. I’ve had to learn a lot of new skill sets.

DL: Right. People go to graduate school to learn that, and you’ve been self-taught while you’re working. Talk to me about that.

Cloutier: It has been challenging. I didn’t even know much about Excel, to be honest. I have taught other people how to do pivot tables and in doing so, I’ve taught myself how to use them. It’s been a lot of Googling. It’s a lot of trial and error.

DL: Did they send you to any formal classes?

Cloutier: We’ve been told we will get to go to NICAR [the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference] in March, but the timing didn’t work out last year because we got the job offer post-NICAR. My colleague has taken a lot of MOOCs [massive open online courses]. I’ve done some of that, but it’s hard to do that and work full-time. A lot of it is self-teaching, like after NICAR, I would use their tip sheets and I would use their software. Using their examples and doing it myself and then doing it with data we had. We have a responsive website so some of the skills that I had, like Google Fusion Tables, are not useful on the front end, but we can still use them on the back end. I haven’t really tackled any of the languages yet, but that’s next.

DL: So how are they evaluating you on your job performance if they are making you do something you don’t know how to do?

Cloutier: I don’t know. I have yet to encounter that. My job has progressed. I got a new boss a month ago, and she has really pushed my writing. I’m writing more about data than I am doing straight data analysis and data visualization. This is a better role for me, I think, because I am not a developer. I would never say I’m a developer. I am definitely interested in learning more of these skill sets, but I don’t claim to be a developer and that’s never been the end goal. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, reporter or editor. She asked me and I was upfront that I wanted to write. I had written a story earlier in the summer that had been on A1 of The Globe, and I had spent a month and a half on it.

DL: What was it about?

Cloutier: It was about the Massachusetts lottery and the way the money is spent; essentially, the flow in and out of the lottery and how it affects different communities, particularly impoverished communities in the state. For me, that was great because I got to touch the end goal of what I want to write about. It’s always nice when the projects you do lend themselves that way. That was a huge undertaking, and she wants me to do more of those kinds of things in addition to writing daily things. That’s the way the industry is going right now: data-driven explainers are popping up, but The Globe didn’t have a team that was doing that. That’s a lot of what we are doing now. The Data Desk, as we are calling it, was brand new in March. It is a new initiative, and we are figuring it out. We have a policy blogger who does a lot of the Vox-ish explainers. I don’t tend to write in explainer format, I usually report out my stories, but they are more about the data on domestic violence and this is what it tells us.

DL: So when you talk about writing about data, you are talking about doing the text wrap around the data.

Cloutier: I do some basic data visualization, we have some producer tools that are easier to use, basic charts and graphs. I use some other software, like Highcharts, for interactive charts that are easy and quick to do.

DL: But you aren’t coding; you are just putting in the data?

Cloutier: I’m putting in the data and doing basic CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] work to make it look right, but I’m not coding. My colleague has experimented in some coding, and I think that lends itself more to what he is interested in. For me, when I do big projects, I usually pair up with a news app developer to do the interactive coding for me.

DL: That goes back to one person supposed to be able to do everything and whether that it’s humanly possible.

Cloutier: It’s not. I was talking about that this morning with my colleague that I’m sharing a room with. Unlike The Erie Times News, where I could put everything together myself, The Globe is a big newsroom and we have a video team, an infographics team, developers and photographers, so you don’t need to do it all yourself. In fact, it’s encouraged for you not to do it all yourself because that’s their skill sets and they are better than you.

Today, I would say that journalism is not just for words. We need to think about things beyond the words. That can be the words in a video or on the printed page or on a website. Things like knowing our audience and knowing how to present the information in a way that’s compelling and interesting and may go viral. You look at Vox.com and their explainer videos, and they are made off the Internet because they don’t necessarily even need sound. They will play on your Facebook stream. That’s the kind of thing that people need to think about when they are presenting information.

Basic journalism skills are essential. When I think about data journalism, I think I can do it and excel (I hope) at it, but I can do it because I have a reporting background and I know what questions to ask. I think the people that don’t, and come into it from a more programmatic angle, don’t know what questions to ask or what context needs to be addressed. Data journalism is all about context; numbers just tell us a small part of the story. They illustrate trends or show us where disparities are, but it’s what causes those things that are the interesting and more compelling part of it. Just throwing numbers at people, I think it’s going to be lost on them, and I think journalism brings the context to data journalism.

DL: ProPublica talks about how it is no longer sufficient to assert an observation, but you always have to prove it. It’s about evidence in addition to assertion.

Cloutier: I think so. We had this example where a features writer wrote a story about a trend of rich, affluent women having four children instead of three. I was asked to provide data about that. I looked at the census in certain affluent communities, the size of households because that is as close as we can get because there is no number of children listed. I found that wasn’t the case. In fact, places like Chelsea and Lawrence in Massachusetts, which are poorer communities, have higher household sizes. That could be multigenerational households, but for the most part, the size of a household does correlate with income, but in the opposite direction. I brought it to them, and they ran the story anyway. They said it was a feature so it was more about people’s experiences than the data. … It’s almost our obligation now that we have access to all the data that we back up what we are saying.

What we’ve seen on the Internet is there are a lot of people saying the same thing. What data is giving us the avenue to do is write enterprise stories that other people won’t have. You submit the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request, you get the data set, you analyze it, you draw conclusions from it, you find the context and then it is your story. The Massachusetts lottery story, for example, no one else had. That was inspired only because I happened to get that data, found the story, it ran and people were talking about it and riffing off it afterwards but it was unique to me.

DL: Do you guys show or post the data set?

Cloutier: In that case, I pushed to post it. I published the front-facing document that didn’t have any of my formulas or calculations. It had gross lottery proceeds and legislative aid distribution. It was the information I had gotten from my requests, but I didn’t post my calculations. I left it up to other people to do what they wanted with it.

DL: The Globe doesn’t have a policy about it?

Cloutier: Not to my knowledge. I don’t know that to be sure. The news app guys might, but I asked my editor and he was fine with doing it. Kind of the ProPublica model, it’s about transparency. This is our data, here’s where we got it, I annotated some of the facts I’d gotten from my reporting so people had some context when analyzing the data. It’s public information, and it wasn’t something that came to us in any way other than a FOIA request. In fact, I don’t even know that I had to submit one of those; they may have just sent them to me.

DL: Is that a bigger part of your job? FOIA requests?

Cloutier: I definitely do that frequently. Usually, they are inspired by news coverage. The lottery story, for example, was inspired by a $30 scratch ticket. Our editor wanted to look at lottery spending, so I requested it, and a month and a half later we had this story about the injustices of the Massachusetts lottery aid system.

DL: What are the Globe’s metrics around impact? You mentioned briefly the idea of something going viral. Was that something you learned in graduate school; did they teach you how things go viral?

Cloutier: No. We use Google analytics, so I had some idea of analytics and what stories tended to do better than other stories. Once I entered The Globe’s newsroom, we were very into analytics. Boston.com used to use a service called Visual Revenue that would tell us the clickage rates. Now we use the Chart Feed equivalent of that. We have a very good sense of it. Our editor is very into Facebook referrals and building audiences on platforms other than Facebook and Twitter.

DL: So as a reporter, are you responsible for all of that, or does someone else do that?

Cloutier: I keep track of it. I think for me, it’s to my advantage for me to know what’s going on with my stories. If I can say I did this and it got this many page views or this many unique visits and it was the highest clicked on thing on the home page during this window, I’m more likely to get other projects like that approved. There is the day-to-day grind, so if you want to do these special projects, you need to be able to prove to them that giving you the time and freedom to do that is worth their while. Especially if it is not going into print. If it’s going to print, they understand that you are now in the print cycle so you can take whatever you need to do to get it to the point they are happy with it. If it is just going online, you need to prove the merit of what you are doing and the merit of your time investment.

DL: Do you think print will stay?

Cloutier: They always say that it’s going away in five to 10 years. I feel like we’ve already hit a couple of the benchmarks they said it would be gone. For the foreseeable future, I think my demographic doesn’t tend to devour print like prior generations have. I don’t know many people who subscribe to print newspapers.