Successful Strategies for Computer-assisted Reporting

Bruce Garrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136686078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Computers have changed the landscape of both gathering and disseminating information throughout the world. As journalists quickly move toward the 21st century and perhaps, a new era of electronic journalism, resources are needed to understand the newest and most successful computer-based news reporting strategies. Written to serve that purpose, this book is designed to show both professional journalists and students which of the newest personal computing tools are being used by the nation's leading news organizations and top individual journalists. It further describes how these resources are being used on a daily basis and for special projects. In recent years, computers have taken on new and dominating roles in the process of news analysis, newsgathering, and news processing. Today's forward-thinking journalists often seek guidance over what they can do to strengthen their ability to be society's information processors and managers. This volume focuses upon how successful journalists are using computers through a major national computer-assisted reporting (CAR) study of daily newspapers. The study included two national surveys and a series of personal interviews with many of the nation's leading CAR specialists. Several current examples of stories used for successful database- and online-oriented news assignments are provided as part of a series of case studies incorporated throughout the book. The additional depth of description and the presentation of portions of stories themselves should help readers to understand the complete process involving CAR-oriented journalism. Substantial analytical detail is used to discuss the extent of computer use in newsrooms, computer training, CAR projects, CAR in daily reporting, hardware and software most commonly used, levels and types of online services used in news research, and portable hardware and software. The book concludes with the author's assessment of the effects and impact of personal computing in the newsroom and the future of personal computer applications in newsgathering. Explaining and defining advanced applications or terminology for readers, the approach to the book assumes a minimal familiarity with computers, but no advanced knowledge of computer operation.

1
Successful Use of Computers in Newsgathering and Processing

Many journalists are just beginning to use computers as tools for newsgathering. How can it be done successfully? Many novices may not be quite sure how the process works. To get things going, let’s consider the successful nature of these two case studies.

Case Study: The Philadelphia Public Schools

Philadelphia’s public schools had been judged by experts in 1994 to be failing their educational mission. But why? And how? Reporters and editors for The Philadelphia Inquirer sought to find answers and explanations. The newspaper’s team of reporters began by collecting information about the performance of the schools in the School District of Philadelphia. Staff writers Thomas Ferrick, Jr., Craig R. McCoy, Neill A. Borowski, and Dale Mezzacappa found data and other forms of information in a variety of places. They obtained much of the data from the school district itself, but also found useful information from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the University of Pittsburgh, the U.S. Department of Education, and a variety of other public sources. Led by Borowski, who is director of computer-assisted reporting (CAR) for his newspaper, the group worked with sociologists and other experts from Temple University to analyze data and uncover trends about the schools and their students.

Borowski (personal communication, November 17, 1995) explained:

Tom Ferrick has been with The Inquirer for years. In the early 1980s or late 1970s, he did, in essence, a project just like this with yellow sheets of legal paper and a calculator, books, and he did it by hand. This time, we did it with a computer. The other interesting thing is that the city school district, through the 1980s, would not release a lot of data. They did not want to have their successes or their failures measured in any way. Very, very little data trickled out. They got a new assistant superintendent who came down here with a different attitude. The old administration of the school district left. And they said, “We’ll give you whatever you want. We can’t give you student-level stuff, but we’ll give you different groups and things like that.”

The result of the investigation and analysis was an eight-page special section entitled, “A District in Distress,” that told readers how the problems causing the district’s poor performance in educating children were only becoming worse. It described how the city had two school systems: a mostly minority public system and a mostly White private and parochial school system. The reporters pointed to the facts: Students could not complete basic tasks, such as math and reading, and their academic performance was poor when compared to other schools on standardized tests. Other data showed that students did not attend school and that they did not graduate. The schools were unsafe and remained deeply segregated. The district, overall, was not doing well compared to nearby suburban districts. The project also demonstrated how the public school system was growing after a period of decline, but that funding was dropping. In the end, the team of reporters and editors found some cause for hope in a new superintendent, a court order to restructure the district, and a public focused on seeking change in the schools.

Most of the special section consisted of tables, color graphs, and charts of data gleaned from the vast collection of sources located by The Inquirer staff. These summaries were supplemented with short stories to explain data and photographs to illustrate points. The help the journalists got from experts paid off, Borowski stated:

We got all the data. We got someone from Temple University who was doing research. And we came out with the project. In a newspaper like The Inquirer that puts a premium on investigations and nailing the bad guys, it was embarrassing that the school district sent over its congratulations on this project and said they loved it. We wondered: “What did we do wrong?” We didn’t do anything wrong. It was probably the best summary of school district statistics in a decade, something, I’m told, the school board can use as a reference.

The project won a National Education Writers award and other recognition from journalists.

Case Study: St. Petersburg/Tampa Area Traffic Accidents

Residents of Pinellas and Hillsborough counties in Florida know the safe and not-so-safe places to drive in their area. They have this information because a reporting team from the St. Petersburg Times analyzed the most dangerous intersections in the two most populated counties in the Tampa Bay area. The newspaper recently published a major Sunday edition project that outlined the most likely places that drivers would be involved in injury-causing traffic accidents on local and state roads. The newspaper placed the project’s lead story on page 1 and included a location map displaying the most likely sites for serious accidents. Inside the front section, the report filled two additional open pages that contained:

• The main story jump from page 1.
• Three sidebars that focused on how to solve traffic problems.
• Sidebar describing a peculiar intersection of odd angles and blind spots.
• Two color aerial photographs of intersections with text labels to explain problem spots.
• Three informational graphics displaying how to improve intersections and how to change traffic signals.
• Project “How we did it” research methods box and an “About the reporter” background box.

Reporter Bill Adair, who covers the transportation beat for his newspaper, was assisted by researchers Simon Lau and Connie Humburg. The stories Adair produced were based on his review and computer-assisted analysis of more than 10,000 injury accidents in the two counties. Adair, 32, was a veteran of 5 years at The Times at the time he worked on the project. Adair and his research team acquired the data from the St. Petersburg and Tampa police departments. The statistics did not include expressways or interstate highways, nor did it include noninjury accidents because both types of accidents are reported differently by different law enforcement agencies.

Such a project is typical of how news organizations are using computers to enhance reporting in the last half of this decade. The project required some computing power combined with more traditional reporting such as interviews and public document searches and reviews. The result was a powerful and simple-to-understand report about traffic safety in the region. It demonstrates what contemporary news reporting should be—an effort taking advantage of all the best information gathering and analyzing tools at hand.

Success in Merging Journalism with Computing

The process of using computers for newsgathering is dynamic. Computers are now inescapable in newsrooms because of their widespread use in writing, editing, typesetting, page layout, graphics creation and editing, and picture editing. But computers are quickly becoming tools for information gathering as well and the discussion ahead focuses on ways to succeed in the endeavor. Computing is the new direction of newsgathering in the last half of the 1990s and in the decade to follow.

Computers have become a part of every journalist’s professional life. Anyone regularly visiting one variation of the virtual newsroom of the late 1990s, also known as list serves on the Internet, knows the scenario: A new personal computer software product comes onto the market. Soon, the questions begin to appear about the product:

• “Is it a good upgrade? Is it better than …?”
• “How much is it? Should we buy it? Is the cost worthwhile?”
• “What new data massaging tricks can be done with it?”

A similar process occurs when significant new computer hardware appears. The questions are equally predictable:

• “Is the extra speed worth the cost?”
• “Is the additional storage (or memory) worth it?”

The exchanges and comments continue for days and even weeks on some of these more technically oriented lists. There is seldom early agreement among the list subscribers, but eventually some sort of consensus is reached. At some point in the evolution, individuals, as well as the journalists responsible for their news organization’s CAR policies, make decisions about the requisite hardware and software and about the databases and online services needed for their work to succeed.

This is the highly informal and often casual nature of the serious computer-oriented journalist. This is how he or she builds the requisite toolbox for computer-assisted reporting, commonly known today as CAR. Most journalists, however, just use what is available to them. They are not that interested in the details of software and hardware, as long as they get the newsgathering job done.

More and more, it seems, journalists interested in CAR are required to use products someone else chose because of corporate decisions about hardware and software that relate more to what is happening in corporate America than in newsrooms. These journalists often must use what is provided, regardless of its suitability and the needs of the project. In some cases, journalists have had to acquire their own computing tools at their own expense.

The hardware and software selection process is highly influenced by the computer industry. Like many other businesses, the computer industry puts its products on retail store shelves and news organizations choose from them. Seldom, if ever, do news organizations create their own tools for CAR. When Microsoft, Computer Associates, Lotus, Packard Bell, Dell, Toshiba, IBM, U.S. Robotics, Hayes, or another computer company introduces a new product, it becomes a potential tool for journalists engaged in this relatively new form of newsgathering that uses computers to collect and often analyze the information. With few, if any, useful tools being developed in the news or information industries, there are not many alternatives. All of these decisions are helping to define success in CAR.

• What tools do journalists use for newsgathering today?
• How are these tools applied to news reporting?
• How do they learn to use them?
• What strategies work best?
• What stories have the most impact and public service?

These are some of the looming questions about uses of computers in journalism. In many ways, they are not very different from the questions asked about computer use in other professional environments. Newsgatherers are adapting the new technology of personal computers to their work. No longer do editors and reporters ask whether computers should be used in reporting. For most news organizations, the decision has been made. Computers do improve reporting and newsgathering. But the next generation of questions centers on different issues, such as those related to the most successful strategies for application of computers in newsgathering. What has the industry learned so far? The discussion in this and the following chapters provides an answer to that question.

Defining Computer-Assisted Reporting

Computer-assisted reporting is the use of computers to locate information and retrieve it from other computers and their databases as well as the use of computers to analyze original databases and databases obtained from other sources for news stories (Garrison, 1995). Simply put, CAR is gradually bringing the methodologies and strategies of the social sciences into the newsroom. CAR is sometimes also termed computer-assisted journalism, but regardless of its label, CAR is a process of newsgathering that employs the data processing power of both personal and mainframe computers. Thus, computer-assisted reporting is the term widely used to refer to the use of computers:

• To connect with other computers (online).
• To create databases or import existing databases, for analysis of data (databases).

“Computer-assisted reporting techniques allow you to take national datasets, localize them, or replicate stories that other people have done on similar topics with similar data across the country,” observed Penny Loeb (1995), a CAR specialist for U.S. News & World Report. “Like social scientists, we can now build upon what has been done somewhere else and each time we will expand the knowledge …. The data are much easier to get now and the technology is much easier and cheaper, so we have a responsibility to our profession and to the public to always try to do our work better.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer Editor Maxwell King (1995) believes CAR offers enhancement of existing strengths to newspaper newsrooms. “CAR is essentially the marriage of technical capacity with the sort of analysis and synthesis that marks strong enterprise and explanatory journalism. We should … aggressively pursue a strong position in this field. It is likely, if we are successful, to reward us with a special expertise, strength, and position in the markets we serve.”

Rosemary Armao, IRE executive director, and Brant Houston, NICAR managing director (1995), have cautioned journalists about the limits of CAR: “[Rjemember what computer-assisted reporting is not. It is not a different species of investigative reporting. It does not replace intelligence and good instincts. It does not end the need to develop sources or to coax people into revealing interviews. It does not reap award-winning stories out of raw numbers alone. But in the hands of careful and thoughtful reporters, computers can elevate their skills” (p. v).

Computers Have Changed Newsroom Work

The appearance of computers in newsrooms has forever changed the work of journalists just as computers have affected just about every other business and industry worldwide. With dedicated word-processing systems that were introduced to newsrooms in the early 1970s and uses of mainframe computers for polls and surveys and a few other unique investigative projects in the 1960s, journalists have had a generation of reporting, writing, and editing with computers available to them. Yet the finer applications of personal computers—introduced to the mass market in the early 1980s—have remained new to many newsrooms, even in the late 1990s, nearly two decades after the development of the first PCs. Today, the impact of computing is unmistakable and widely recognized.

“Journalism … has been transformed by computerization,” Cole C. Campbell (1995, p. A2), editor of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, recently wrote to his readers. “Computers now shape nearly every aspect of our work.”

Utica College Journalism Professor Cecilia Friend feels the use of computers for news reporting is significant: “Computer access to government data and the technique of using a computer program to analyze them is a dramatic breakthrough for journalists—not only because it allows reporters to dig deeper and faster than before and find patterns not possible by traditional means, but because the tool can be value-neutral,” Friend (1994, pp. 69-70) stated. “It can replace anecdotal tales or interpreted statistics with the record itself. By dealing directly with the unadorned numbers of a database, reporters can bypass the spin doctors and vested interests who previously not only supplied the information but selected and interpreted it as well.”

The handful of journalists who have been working wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Successful Use of Computers in Newsgathering and Processing
• 2 Computers in the Newsroom
• 3 Projects and Daily Computer-Assisted Reporting
• 4 Hardware Tools for Computer-Assisted Reporting
• 5 Software Tools for Computer-Assisted Reporting
• 6 Online Services and the Internet
• 7 Portable Computer-Assisted Reporting
• 8 Moving Toward 21st-Century CAR
• Appendix A: 1994-95 Research Questionnaires
• Appendix B: Muskegon Chronicle Jail Crowding Case Study
• Appendix C: Miami Herald Crime and No Punishment Case Study
• Appendix D: CAR Software Publishers’ Technical Support Hotlines
• Appendix E: Internet Distribution Lists for CAR Journalists
• Appendix F: Internet World Wide Web Sites for CAR Journalists
• Appendix G: Plain Dealer FAA’s Unreliable Air Records Case Study
• References
• Index