CAR becomes as commonplace as telephone-assisted reporting

Computer-assisted reporting? The activity is In, the label is Out.

Broadly speaking, said Database Editor Jennifer LaFleur, it's using a computer to analyze data and draw conclusions. According to her colleague, Tom Boyer, "in a space of about four years, it got to the point where to use a computer in reporting one way or another was ubiquitous."

Boyer, database editor at the Seattle Times, contends that the term is antiquated, a relic of the time when it was novel for reporters to have PCs on their desks.

"There's so many forms of computer-assisted reporting, I don't even use the term anymore because it doesn't describe anything," said Boyer.

LaFleur, database editor at the San Jose Mercury News, agreed. After all, she said, "you don't have telephone-assisted reporting."

Bestowing PCs on reporters gave them enhanced and powerful tools for analyzing mountains of data in shorter order, but they often still had to know how to use some fairly mysterious technologies -- such as nine-track tapes. Moreover, the technology did not tell reporters where to get the tapes, and how to follow the sometimes twisted procedures for procuring them.

It didn't stop government agencies from charging sometimes astronomical rates in some newly created cost categories associated with reproducing the data. And it didn't eliminate the time lags between the time the data were requested and the time they landed in the appropriate sets of hands.

Pat Stith is both a database editor and an investigative reporter (he goes back and forth, he said) at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. Stith said he used to photocopy "a bazillion records," cut them apart, rearrange them, copy them again, color code them.

It was, he said, computing by hand.

Then, Stith said, he was struck down on the road to Damascus. "I was not technically oriented and didn't care. Then I was at an IRE [Investigative Reporters and Editors] conference in 1989."

Partly fearful of competition, partly excited, he said, "I went down to the front of the church like a Baptist walking down the aisle. I was in the second IRE class in March 1990."

Stith knows how to acquire databases. And he definitely knows how to use them. He, fellow reporter Joby Warrick and Project Editor Melanie Sill used databases to help them investigate the hog farming industry in North Carolina.

The "Boss Hog" story they produced landed the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1996.

Much of their analysis relied on data procured by more traditional methods. Stith said a telephone database with North Carolina phone records -- tens of millions of calls made in a two-year period -- provided information that Murphy Family Farms, the hog farmer in question, received the equivalent of roughly one call per hour, every working day of the year, from state officials.

Another database let the investigative team track the movements of another state official via credit card records.

They also tried to use records of water quality tests conducted by the state, in order to discern whether the waste produced by hog farms had degraded water quality.

"The hog industry took the database out of public domain in 1993 by sleight of hand," said Stith, mentioning that the head of the hog farm had spent some time in the North Carolina Senate. During his tenure, a number of laws benefiting the hog farming industry were passed.

"It was in a public record only for the purpose of fighting rabies, and the law kept it out of the hands of the state environmental agency if they were looking for human, not animal, disease," he said.

The News & Observer team created what Stith calls "a money machine database" with 300,000 political contributions built around the giver, not the candidate.

Analysis showed that the hog farmer in question skirted campaign contribution laws by having virtually every member of his extended family make $2000 contributions on the same day -- a grand total of $20,000.

Internet reporting
The investigation also relied on data retrieved from government web sites by news researcher Brooke Cain, who earned her master's degree in English while working part-time at the paper.

In the Boss Hog project, her work helped Stith tie together corporate players in the state and the rest of the country. Her research took her to the Edgar archives for company reports, and to the web page of the U.S. Census Bureau, to gather demographic data about towns and states in the Midwest that are big hog producers.

Cain does almost all of Stith's on-line searching; researchers are a trusted part of the reporting team. When Stith needs help, he said he goes to Cain, tells her what he's working on and tells her what he thinks he wants.

"I expect her to look for what I want, and also to use her head," he said. "I give her enough of an idea about the story so she can use her own initiative."

Often, the newsroom asks for information via an e-mail address called Research -- what kind of story, what information, when it's needed. The research staff looks at the requests and then sends a message to say who's taking what task.

People also just call, or walk in and talk. The closeness of the relationship varies, Cain said, depending on the story.

Internet reporting is what everyone thinks of when computer-assisted reporting is discussed, said San Jose's LaFleur. She suggested that people should use the Internet like they're using the telephone, not like it's some kind of specialization.

A lot of early Internet research took place on local newsgroups, said Cain. A reporter would place a message on a newsgroup and look for people "who do x or y, who know this or that." But there are some really strange people out there, she said, and reporters usually get steered away from that technique these days.

Nonetheless, newsgroups are still a fruitful resource. A new web site, Deja News, can search newsgroups to find experts, allow you to search for newsgroups related to particular topics, or to build an author profile to tell you which newsgroups people post to, how many messages they post, and whether the message is unique, new, or a response to another message.

It's free, said Raleigh's Cain.

Database editors and news researchers accumulate these resources bit by bit. LaFleur, for example, reads magazines (Wired drives her crazy and gives her a headache, but she rates Internet World as good), scans lots of listserves, and talks with people in the newsroom to share ideas.

Formerly with Nicar, the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting based at the University of Missouri at Columbia, LaFleur also relies on its newsletter for information on good web sites.

At the Dallas Morning News, Shawn MacIntosh, the paper's assistant projects editor, believes the News publishes a story virtually every day in which Internet research played a part.

"It's not so special anymore," she said. "I don't even know about a lot of them."

For a story on the urban myth of Halloween candy laced with bad things, one of MacIntosh's reporters relied on Profnet for experts, went to newsgroups to find people with real life experience, then followed up with the telephone.

"The Internet is just an everyday tool," she said.

For now, News reporters share a public computer in the newsroom. "It's busy all the time," MacIntosh said. Access should be a lot easier to come by within a year, once the paper gets its T-1 data line to the Internet.

Whether in Raleigh or Dallas, San Jose or Seattle, local, state and federal government web sites are a key source of information.

Many government sites list telephone extensions for sources, Seattle's Boyer pointed out.

For her part, Cain said much of her research involves accessing government web sites.

"Now they have all their information on the Internet," she said. "Yesterday I had to get information on Aids. I started making phone calls, and people said 'Look on our web site.' You can get some really good stuff."

Being able just to browse unassisted is one thing Cain especially likes. "It's right at your fingertips," she said. Some of her favorite sites include the Centers for Disease Control, chambers of commerce, the Federal Register, and a Securities and Exchange Commission site that provides Form 10-K reports for free.

Newsroom connections to the Internet are a must, contended the Times' Boyer. About a third of the people in his newsroom have T-1 access to the 'Net via Macs or PCs on their desks.

The other two-thirds still have Atex terminals, but can access the Web via public terminals in the newsroom.

The biggest obstacle to full access, he reported, is finding desk space for PCs. "We have to get rid of Atex first," he said, which may happen within a year, when the Times moves the newsroom to Quark Publishing System.

In the meantime, he said, it's difficult to ask people to get up from their desks and go sit down at a public terminal: "You wouldn't ask people to wait in line for a telephone. The Internet is just like a telephone for reporters."

Internet research techniques at the Times vary from reporter to reporter, said Boyer, "but there's an awful lot of Alta Vista and Yahoo. Sometimes on a breaking story they go to the Web just to see what's going up."

E-mail is also a major thing for reporters, he said. It's a way of getting in touch with sources, obtaining press releases and exchanging information.

Intranet reporting
Often, an intranet is a way of enabling reporters to do their own Internet searches.

At the Times, reporters have access to an in-house virtual Rolodex with more than 3000 sources and emergency numbers, Boyer said.

"We're trying to get every reporter to put key phone numbers into the Rolodex, and hope that we'll have as many as 7000 numbers," he said. "When a reporter is outside their usual beat area, or is in the newsroom alone on the weekend, they have a way of getting information about who handles snow removal on the weekend without wasting time."

Five years ago, the Times news research staff spent their time going to Dialog and looking up stories from other newspapers. But today, reported Boyer, a researcher is likely to be collecting web links or updating databases.

One researcher became an expert on campaign contributions, built a web front-end to that database, and now is responsible for maintaining it.

Boyer uses Allaire Corp.'s Cold Fusion (http://www.allaire.com/) to write web forms for SQL queries, and expects that within six months the rest of the research staff will be able to join him.

Since nearly 90 percent of database queries are simple and repetitive, web forms reduce the amount of time it takes to train reporters to do their own searches, and makes them less reliant on the research staff to help them negotiate complex search languages.

So now Times reporters can query a database through a web format to find information on campaign contributions, and property records, and there is a web interface to the paper's text library. Staff can also get to other in-house databases and CD-ROMs on the network.

Having the network and web interface to these resources eliminates the need to update and maintain 300 client computers. The reference CD-ROMs are run through CD Vision C Commander

In Raleigh, all reporters at the News & Observer have Internet access from their desktop, and often do their own research.

The news research department has built the NRD page (pronounced nerd, of course) for in-house use. The first page, said Cain, has search archives back to 1990, a two-year photo archive, and a catalog of resources to tell reporters where to find, for example, a book on race cars. But the staff can also do a quick lookup on basic factual stuff about towns -- populations and city officials, she said.

There's also a beat reporting reference guide to the Web as well, divided into beats and topics. The education beat link, for example, takes you to web sites on education around the country.

There are also links to environment, health, business and government, as well as journalism links to Editor & Publisher, American Journalism Review and other newspapers (including many local papers that are not on providers like Lexis-Nexis).

A page with general reference provides links to an on-line version of the FAA and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, among others. There are also pages with links to information on the News & Observer's owner, McClatchy Newspapers of Sacramento, Calif.; other N&O publications; employee information, including telephone numbers and e-mail addresses; training schedules, and research staff specialties. When a new link is added, an e-mail message goes to the entire newsroom.

Basically, said Cain, it just goes on and on and on. "Once you start clicking," she said, "it never stops."

Of course, we all know that no technology solves every problem. But the evolving version of computer-assisted reporting -- Internet reporting -- can solve some of them.

It will be essential, as with all newsroom technologies, to make sure that newsroom users get the training they need. That's not happening at most papers, LaFleur said.

For one thing, she said, reporters need to be aware that "the beauty of the Internet is that anybody can be anybody." While most federal of state sites are pretty stable and reliable, she said, it's wise to follow up on new sites or newsgroups with a phone call -- just to be sure.

MacIntosh, who was project editor at USA Today when it created its CAR department in 1989, does Internet training at the Morning News. Four times a year she offers a two-day comprehensive CAR boot camp with sections on the Internet, databases, spreadsheets and the Microsoft Access database; she also offers 40-minute one-on-one sessions.

At the News & Observer, a computer training center offers classes in everything from Windows and Macs to HTML coding.

It's important to make sure that reporters know that while the Internet is where the fascination is, LaFleur said, it's more a tool like the telephone, just one tool among several you can use. Reporting, computer assisted or not, remains a process of analyzing information you get, no matter where it's from, and turning it into useful information.

While many newspapers have focused on the Internet as a revenue source, Boyer emphasized the revolutionary nature of using information gleaned from the 'Net for in-house use.

"The current wave of information should make newsrooms better at gathering and analyzing information. [It's a mistake] if you're spending money and not improving the way you handle information," he said.

"It should make you a better newsroom, be a way to get better information in the newspaper. I'm seeing that.

"There's better analysis and faster response to breaking stories. We're getting some stories in on the first day with only four hours to work with. Five to 10 years ago it would have taken several days.

"When it works, we're that much better."

-- L. Carol Christopher

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.