Getting organized is essential in surviving the info-deluge

It's been quite a while since systems types had to spend time in training sessions explaining to new newsroom hires what a cursor is. Now the time-honored qualities that have come to define the job of journalist -- curiosity, innovation, resourcefulness, creativity -- have been combined with a growing awareness of computer-based ways to organize one's tasks.

Dedicated and computer-savvy reporters are keeping investigative work alive when every kind of pressure -- minutes, money, corporations and stockholders, even spending quality time with a family -- is at odds with in-depth investigation.

For about $100 a year now, journalists at the 286,000-circulation Milwaukee Journal Sentinel can tell you enough about the state's prisoners to keep you awake at night. Their database on prisons indicates that release dates keep arriving earlier and earlier because of the ubiquitous phenomenon of prison overcrowding.

In Phoenix, FBI uniform crime stats data arrive at the Arizona Republic on a disk from the Phoenix Police Department each week, get dragged through spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel, cleaned up and organized by ZIP code, then exported to the newspaper's front-end system for publication in zoned news sections.

"Readers love seeing the crime going on in their ZIP code," said John Leach, the paper's senior editor for technology.

That might also provide an interesting comparison to another set of data the paper has bought and massaged -- the percentage change in home prices, also organized by ZIP codes. (Half had gained 25 percent in 1994 -- we bet it probably isn't in the ZIP codes with the high crime stats.)

In-house talent was used for both projects, Leach said, along with another effort that has made it possible to electronically drag election results from the state and push them into a Microsoft Access database as little as 15 minutes before the page deadline for use both on-line and in print.

He expects that the crime stats data will be available on the 'Net before too long, using ArcView from ESRI of Redlands, Calif., for the mapping part of the projects.

Management tool
In his regular presentations on personal information management for journalists, Stephen Miller, the assistant to the technology editor at the New York Times, points out that "every reporter already has a database that is underutilized -- your notebooks," along with file folders and 3-by-5-inch index cards. Their drawback: They aren't structured to allow easy retrieval of information.

Database reporting, regardless of the eye-opening range of uses it's put to, is not news, and neither are databases. But once you've invested enough time to learn the skills, there are ways to put the same tools to work to organize your own life as well.

For example, if you look on the back of this newsletter, you'll see that its publisher has a significant investment in HyperCard. And this correspondent, though chronically behind in her data entry, has favored FileMaker Pro for managing the details of scholarly research, a database of sources which are keyworded and are connected to abstracts of published stories.

FileMaker also helps in figuring out who gets billed for which phone calls at the end of the month.

A product made by a now-defunct manufacturer of contact databases still holds personal and business phone numbers, and can be printed in book form using ClickBook software from BookMaker Corp. of San Francisco. With more time and storage capacity, every shred of tax data required by the IRS could be scanned onto a series of Zip disks in order to free two-thirds of the closet space in my spacious abode.

Sound familiar?

"The info-floodgates have opened," said Miller, "and if you haven't piled up your digital sandbags yet, be prepared to evacuate."

Information overload is a way of life for Miller.

"Let's ignore for a moment the traditional news sources -- wire services, newspapers, magazines, radio and television -- and just concentrate on keeping up with your beat. On my beat, computers, I get about two dozen phone calls a day and 20 or 30 pieces of mail and two or three unsolicited faxes. In addition, I have 1200 individuals, nearly 600 companies and about a dozen projects to keep track of at all times. The list keeps growing.

"I have two electronic mail accounts and average about 150 pieces of e-mail a day. In addition, I'm on a dozen or so electronic mailing lists and I routinely monitor about a 20 or 30 forums, Usenet newsgroups and bulletin board systems. My World-Wide Web bookmarks are up to nearly 500."

He has a number of ideas for managing the info-deluge.

In his work, he regularly evaluates gadgets and software for review. He's put in the time to design a database that will tell him, in a flash, how many laptops he's seen which weigh less than five pounds.

At other times in his life, he's used word processors and spreadsheets to manage free-lance work. With one file called "contacts" and another called "workdue," he could keep track of the basics using nothing more complicated than the word processor's search function.

But it was the conversion to spreadsheets, he says, that put him in control. Importing his "workdue" file to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and adding fields such as when the work was turned in and when he was supposed to be paid gave him "more control in keeping track of assignments," "a clear picture of my financial situation" and "a powerful tool to help feed my family."

But just because Miller spent the time to build from scratch doesn't mean you have to. He recommends specialized database programs -- personalized information managers (PIMs) "to keep track of all your stuff." Though he notes that many were originally designed for sales people, they're useful for other people -- say, um, journalists -- who have lots of public contact.

"A PIM can keep your appointment calendar, a database of your contacts, all the details about that contact including what kind of fishing lure she prefers for catching small-mouth bass. It can keep a record of whom you called, what time, what you talked about, when you need to call them back, and just about anything else you try to keep track of in your professional and private life."

Miller issued several caveats, however.

First, designing your own database is no quick fix -- it's a lot of work. And while that makes the pre-designed PIMs sound better -- maybe lots better -- Miller warned that "if you commit to running your life digitally, you must be disciplined about keeping things up to date. It can seem tedious and redundant in the beginning, and at times, it will seem like too much work."

He's one reporter, however, who feels that the investment has yielded big dividends.

Beyond the personal
When the idea of putting the Associated Press (or other) style book on-line came up nearly a billion years ago, lots of us wrestled with exactly how to do it.

How big could each section of it be without crashing a terminal? Could editors use it without closing the file they were already working on? These were problems that, if you've come into this business in the last 10 years, probably sound like the kind of scary stories kids tell each other around the camp fire.

In part, that's because the technological landscape has changed so dramatically, but it's also because of those brain cells that lurk in some people's heads -- always determined to come up with a better way of doing something.

Russell Clemings, a reporter at the 156,000-circulation Fresno (Calif.) Bee, appears to be one of those types.

Keeping an eye open to the innovations that come out of the Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. organization -- among other places -- he's developed tools for use both at his newspaper and for the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ).

In the Bee's newsroom, he's worked out a data intranet with links to Internet sites. He introduced a small but growing collection of tools, as he put it, such as a percentage calculator and weights and measures converter.

The intranet also organizes data on voter registration, political contributions, a grantor-grantee index, births, deaths and marriages. And he continues to pursue the ever-elusive goal of a perfect on-line style book and newsroom Rolodex.

For now, anyone within the Bee's local firewall -- including bureaus and community publications -- can use the intranet, he said. However, with an account on the newsroom NT system, access will be available from anywhere on the Internet.

"So far," said Clemings, "that means just me," since reporters and editors don't currently have web browsers on their desktops. But with the arrival of a new NT-based publishing system later this year, he expects access to broaden.

For SEJ (http://www.sej.org/), Clemings has put together an on-line calendar and database of Internet links.

Beyond the obvious
When you watch Steve Ross at work crunching numbers, his unadulterated enthusiasm -- well, it's more like rubbing-your-hands-together kind of glee -- may momentarily distract you from the serious investigative projects he's worked on.

Ross, who is a journalism professor at Columbia University in New York (among other things), says his favorite trick for Really Big Stories is to store up his notes, with every paragraph of text or line of a data table as a separate record, inside an askSam text database, made by askSam Systems of Perry, Fla.

Ross, a raconteur extraordinaire, will tell you about using askSam to catch big fish in the New York and New Jersey port authorities in a net of their own words. He trains his students to use spreadsheets on the fly so they can analyze data in the course of an interview -- saving them from having to call their source back later.

But he's also using fax character recognition software to build databases, as well. He thinks Caere OmniPage, from Caere Corp. of Los Gatos, Calif., is an especially cute piece of software.

"If someone is faxing me a few pages of data, I switch off the regular fax and collect the fax through the fax software on the modem.

"That keeps the fax as a TIF, which Caere can perform OCR [optical character recognition] upon. Better than trying to scan the paper fax," said Ross, "because the fax comes in at only 100 to 200 dpi, and scanning further distorts the characters.

"OmniPage can send the tabular material straight to Excel," he said, and the numbers scan more accurately. If the fax comes in with really small characters on papers, he says, just enlarge them on a copier before rescanning them into OmniPage.

-- L. Carol Christopher

askSam Systems, (850) 584-6590, e-mail: info@askSam.com;
Bookmaker Corp., (415) 354-8160;
Caere Corp., (408) 395-7000, e-mail: Caereocr_sales@caere.com;
ESRI, (909) 793-2853, e-mail: info@esri.com;
Lotus Development Corp., (617) 577-8500;
NewsEngin Inc., (314) 865-4204, e-mail: george@NewsEngin.com.

See also The Lotus position.

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.