By the middle of the 1800s, Congressmen’s compensation for travel to and from their districts had been an unsuccessful but simmering reform target for years. The law provided for a 40-cent per-mile mileage reimbursement, and computed the distance “by the usually travelled route.” After taking his seat, Greeley got a look at the schedule listing every congressman’s mileage and was shocked by the sums. To Greeley, the disbursements were a wasteful relic of an earlier time, when travel to and from the far-flung reaches of the United States would have been a costly, bruising affair. The 40-cent mileage had been calculated decades earlier to match a pre-1816 congressman’s pay rate of $8 a day, assuming he could travel a mere 20 miles per day. However, thanks to steamships and the increasing prevalence of trains, travelers could go far faster than that.
Greeley saw it as an outrageous waste of the taxpayer’s money, and deployed his newspaper to correct that wrong. “If the route usually travelled from California to Washington is around Cape Horn — or the Members from that embryo State shall choose to think it is — they will each be entitled to charge some $12,000 Mileage per session accordingly.”
Rather than simply opining against it, he conceived and published a data-journalism project that, in form if not in execution, would be very much at home in a newsroom today. He asked one of his reporters, Douglas Howard, a former postal clerk, to use a U.S. Post Office book of mail routes to calculate the shortest path from each congressman’s district to the Capitol, and compared those distances with each congressman’s mileage reimbursements. On Dec. 22, 1848, with Greeley now simultaneously its editor and a brand new congressman from New York, the Tribune published a story and a table in two columns of agate type. The table listed each congressman by name with the mileage he received, the mileage the postal route would have granted him and the difference in cost between them. “Let no man jump at the conclusion that this excess has been charged and received contrary to law,” wrote Greeley in the accompanying text. “The fact is otherwise. The members are all honorable men — if any irrelevant infidel should doubt it, we can silence him by referring to the prefix to their names in the newspapers.”