News Library News Online
Vol. 22, No. 4/Summer 2000

Table of Contents
Regular Features

New This Month

News Library News
SLA News Division Home

 

COMPUTER ASSISTED REPORTING FOR NEWS LIBRARIANS

SLA News Division’s Continuous Education Course, Sunday June 11, 2000

By Dana Gordon

From acquiring databases to crunching the numbers, the News Division’s Continuous Education course in Computer Assisted Reporting showed us how to help our reporters turn out high impact stories with an emphasis on CAR at deadline. Attendees were continually challenged by the speakers to find ways to add value to the data acquired for their newsrooms.

Rob Robinson of National Public Radio was the moderator and opened the session by challenging us to leave the course with 3 story ideas.

Brant Houston of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and Tom McGinty of the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR), showed examples of CAR stories, the databases used, and the impact the stories had on their communities. Brant asked some thought-provoking questions:

  • How many of us were responsible for actually acquiring the databases that would be used in our stories?
  • How many of us were responsible for updating them and keeping them for future use?
  • How many of us had intranets with front ends to query public records databases?
  • How many of us were acquiring the 990 forms of our local charities?

Databases used for the stories shown included police assignment reports, 911 call response times, real estate records and professional licensing records. Houston also recommended accident and inspection reports. To paraphrase Houston, " ... if it collides or falls and there’s a database, you should have it." For obtaining demographic data, Houston suggested sharing the cost with your marketing department. Houston and McGinty stressed the importance of maintaining databases by updating them regularly and archiving older data so it can be quickly retrieved. For a list of databases available from NICAR, and more information on IRE, go to http://www.ire.org.

Debbie Wolfe, Technical Training Editor for the St. Petersburg Times, urged us to get more involved in training our users in the basic math techniques needed for CAR. For example, you can design a training course or offer to work with your newsroom’s trainer as an assistant. She reminded us that if our reporters do not know the math, they will not be effective users of the spreadsheets and databases needed for CAR stories.

She showed us some drills she put up on her intranet for handling fractions and percent, and then led us in a rousing version of the "Percent Change Cheer!" She demonstrated how to use Excel to manipulate data and showed how even simple concepts such as percent of total or percent change can show patterns in data.

Jennifer Small Evert of Lexis-Nexis (and formerly with the San Antonio Express-News) encouraged us to become adept at finding and manipulating data quickly so we can become more effective on deadline. She revealed the secrets not just for finding public data on the Web, but pulling it into your newsroom no matter what the file format. Using Excel’s "Import Wizard", she went through several examples of downloading and converting data.

Griff Palmer, Database Editor of the Daily Oklahoman, helped us dive into the world of Census data and show how it could be used for deadline stories. He reminded us that the Census Bureau has already done a lot of the work for us by providing services like American FactFinder. You can also go to the Census Web site (http://www.census.gov) to access embargoed press releases.

The Census Bureau does studies in addition to population surveys, and Griff gave an example of one that showed the relationship between computer ownership and income level, which became the source for a story. Showing us a story on school choice, he demonstrated how mapping techniques could be helpful for stories with a geographic element.

Andy Lehren, an associate producer on the investigative team at Dateline NBC, showed us how CAR could be used on deadline for broadcast stories, and demonstrated with a story on school van safety. Vans are increasingly being used by school districts because they are cheaper than school buses, but they do not meet the same safety standards. Dateline obtained a publicly available list of vans sold to school districts and was able to confront a government official on air who said that the data would be too difficult to find. Andy gave us other examples of CAR at Dateline and emphasized the importance of maintaining databases such as airplane records in order to quickly turn around stories after crashes. When John F. Kennedy Jr’s plane crashed, Dateline was able to quickly produce a story that included detailed information about the history of the plane.

David Kearney, Information Services Specialist with the Census Bureau in Philadelphia, spoke about Census products on the web, the coming release of Census 2000 data and changes coming to how data is collected. Data for Census 2000 will be collected until July 2000 and the full population count will be released by December 31. Congress will use this data to decide reapportionment, and preliminary Census data is expected to be released on the web site in April 2001.

Handouts for several of the speakers may be found at the News Division Web site at http://metalab.unc.edu/slanews/conferences/sla2000/index.htm.


Dana Gordon works at Newsweek Inc. in New York. You can contact her at danag@newsweek.com.


News Library News
SLA News Division Home

The page was reformatted on 4/8/03. The content, including URLs and contact information, on this page has not been updated to preserve the historical record.

Comments about News Library News should go to the editor.
Comments about the Web site should go to the Webmaster: newsdivisionweb@yahoo.com