After keeping it under wraps for several weeks, we’re finally unveiling what we’ve been working on since the start of the semester — our revamped, interactive, interesting and informative salary database.
At the beginning of the semester, I wrote a column saying we would push out the database sometime during the semester. We had no idea at the time how great the database would turn out, but one click on lsureveille.com/salary should please our readers.
My favorite part about the salary database is two-fold. The first is that it enhances our commitment to watchdog journalism and transparency by giving our readers easy access to public records. The second is its purely digital presence, and the ways in which is pushes us to enhance our online presence and grow our online readership.
Gone are the days when our readers had to scroll through boring Microsoft Excel sheets to find their professors’ salaries. Now, we’ve made it possible for students to search employees by name, and we’ve used color-coded breakdowns to depict how someone’s salary ranks among his or her peers at the University.
We’ve been studying this data for a while, so we broke it down to make it most understandable and accessible for our readers using graphics that highlight how much money comes from each building, job title and department.
Click on “How much money is in that building?” for one of our coolest features, a map of the University with dollar signs in different shades of green and red and sizes that reveal where the most money manifests itself on campus and where University employees are paid the least.
We’re well aware of the questions that will pop into most people’s minds after looking up LSU football coach Les Miles’ salary and seeing only $300,000 next to his name. Our database contains other employees whose listed salaries aren’t the same as their true earnings either.
The numbers in the salary database are reflective of base salaries from the University, so additional foundation money, grants, or in the case of Miles, supplemental media compensation, is not shown in the database.
An extraordinary amount of work went into the creation of this project, spearheaded by The Daily Reveille’s Managing Editor for External Media Bryan Stewart and our Web Data Editor Jared Kendall. Several other reporters and editors helped to bring the final product to its fruition.
As we continue to make strides to push The Reveille into a digital-first mindset, these are the types of online components that we hope to create more of. Thus, we ask for all of our readers to give us their feedback and let us know what other information they would like to see broken down and displayed in such a way.
Peruse our database and share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and every other social media outlet that you use. Love it? Great. Hate it? Let us know. Everything we do is to serve our readers, and we hope we’ve done that with our new salary database.
Happy scrolling!
