Small Paper, Big Project   

As the technology guru of one mid-sized daily explains, computer-assisted reporting isn't just for the major metros.

Dwight Morris is one of America's better journalists and a heck of a nice guy. Still, there are times you would like to strangle him.

Slowly.

His lecture at a conference on computer-assisted reporting last year springs to mind. Morris was explaining how he had done some groundbreaking work for the Los Angeles Times, where he is the paper's Washington, D.C.-based editor for special investigations. Morris had felt certain that a tremendous story was hiding in the congressional campaign finance records kept by the Federal Election Commission.

Morris told the group how he decided to use nearly half of his expense allowance – some $30,000 – to hire typists to punch a warehouse full of data into his computer. Morris then sat down to see what he could see.

While Morris relayed his story, including how he found that some of the campaign money went to buy luxuries such as cars and vacations, you could see the same thought ricocheting like a pinball through the heads of his listeners, most of whom didn't work at papers the size of the Times:

Thirty grand? For typists?

Others weren't so surprised. Since its inception, computer-assisted journalism has been viewed as the province of mega-metros with huge resources: the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer. But now newspapers like the Waterbury Republican-American are coming aboard.

The Waterbury Republican-American?

True, the 60,000-circulation Connecticut paper where I work isn't among the nation's dominant dailies. But that's just the point: It demonstrates that far from being the exclusive province of big-city outlets, computer-assisted reporting has finally allowed small players to compete in the big leagues.

The Tax on Living

Last year, talk in Waterbury centered on the depressed state economy. Connecticut had lost 180,000 jobs during the recession – 12 percent of its non-farm work force. Finger-pointing became the state's leading sport.

One day a state development official came to town to blame the banking industry. The credit crunch was the sole cause of the state's economic woes, he told us. "Do you know what happens when someone takes $2 billion out of the private sector economy?" he asked.

As the Republican-American's news systems editor in charge of computer-assisted reporting, I thought that was an excellent question, since the state itself had taken $2 billion out of the private sector in a series of record tax hikes. What effect did politicians have on the economy?

Almost everyone blamed government for the state's struggles, either by doing too much or too little, for taxing too much or spending too little, or for cutting back on important defense industries.

We felt the question of what had gone wrong was important to our readers, especially since the November election would give voters the chance to fill every seat in the state legislature, six spots in the U.S. House, one in the Senate, and the presidency.

To that end, we set out to calculate what readers were paying in total federal, state and local taxes and what they were getting for their money, then ask legislators to explain their methods in dividing the pie.

We examined 10 years of budgets from the federal government, the states of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts (for comparisons), 22 local towns and 16 school districts. We crunched those numbers in a series of interlocking spreadsheets, then linked the data with the finances of a dozen families who agreed to participate.

"The Tax on Living" ran daily for three weeks in October and November, ending the day before the election. The computer model showed the total taxes paid by each family, which governments got the money, and how it was spent.

We found that the average Connecticut family was paying a little more than 50 percent of its income in taxes. In fact, taxes were at a point where companies such as United Parcel Service and Saab America found it cheaper to move their headquarters out of state.

It also showed the money was not all going for vital national interests. Not only did Congress increase its own budget 17 percent last year, the money bought such items as photo, radio and television studios for House and Senate members to assist their reelection efforts.

The series looked closely at George Bush's and Ronald Reagan's budgets, Gov. Bill Clinton's state budgets, the Connecticut budget, and the conduct of Congress and our state legislature. By the time we were finished, all three political parties had stopped speaking to us. (Connecticut has a third-party governor.)

Perhaps the biggest fuss occurred after we obtained a confidential document that revealed the ugly truth about the nation's Social Security Trust Fund: There isn't one.

All Social Security taxes go straight to the Treasury, where they are spent just like the rest of our taxes. The money is replaced with IOUs.

From the calls and letters we received, we know the series was read. Many readers mailed us the forms we had printed to allow them to compute their own total tax. The key was showing the impact government policies have on families, rather than simply printing numbers. It is one thing to explain that X amount goes to taxes. It is another to visit parents who pay thousands of dollars to the government but can't afford their child's allergy shots.

"The Tax on Living" project demonstrated that computer-assisted journalism enables small- and mid-size papers to turn out the sort of reporting once limited to mega-metros. And it doesn't have to be complicated or cost a lot of money. Our Computer Journalism Department cost only $5,000 to set up in 1991, and we now arm most of our reporters with "information appliances" – specialized computer programs designed to be as simple to operate as a microwave oven.

Our City Hall reporter, for instance, can take notes on her notebook computer during meetings. Let's say that John Smith asks that all zoning laws be abrogated on his property, and the mayor agrees. Our reporter can access her database, then type in "John Smith." The computer checks the mayor's campaign contributions and either shows her that Smith is on the list (with a home address and other information to confirm his identity), or it says, "That person is not on the list."

In either case, she gets the data she needs before deadline, not several days later.

Besides the campaign contribution lists, reporters have appliances that supply standardized test scores, census data and corporate employee lists with titles. We've also installed the employee list program on the copy desk, where it has been used to clear up those deadline wrangles over whether the cutline or the story has the correct spelling of a name.

The point of this tale is that all of these appliances use data cannibalized from other stories. If you build a database to check on the mayor's contributors, don't shove it in your desk. Chances are your city hall reporter can use it again and again. And the costs are no longer as prohibitive as they were just a few years ago.

Some advice for small- and mid-size newspapers and broadcast outlets: Start small. Focus on projects that can be used as building blocks. Management and staff must cooperate.

Just Do It

There's an old programmer's joke that says, "Any program that runs is, by definition, obsolete." In other words, technology changes so fast that any programmer enmeshed in the mundane work of getting his program to run has probably already been left behind by others adding improvements.

But there is also a subtle warning in those words: You can wait for tomorrow until you've wasted all your todays. You can go without a computer because you have skipped buying today's 486 computers after hearing rumors that the 586 will soon be widely available or that a 686 is under development. Of course by the time you can buy a 686, the 786 will be under way.

Likewise, there are always three more things you need before you start doing computer-assisted journalism: a faster computer, a bigger disk drive to store your data and better software.

Get on with it.

To start, choose smaller projects that you can build on as your data grow. Analyze your city's budget; chances are good there will be another one next year. Once you've built a spreadsheet, you can add columns to eternity. Take a look at the standardized test scores from your schools; again, this is data that is released annually.

Soon you'll have a stable of projects that can simply be updated every year. And while these may not be the most glamorous stories, budgets and school performance tend to interest readers. In fact, the "glamorous" stories can be electronic quicksand: Reporters tread into them and are never heard from again.

This should be no surprise. It is an article of faith that you must know how to write an eight-inch story before you try a series. And there are good reasons: If you don't understand how to organize a short story, you're sure to wander far afield when trying to put together a longer one.

Imagine then how lost a reporter can become in the midst of writing a computerized magnum opus while working his or her way through database programs such as Foxpro and Paradox, which arrive with (I'm not making this up) seven manuals weighing more than 10 pounds.

Once you've mastered the small projects, charge ahead. While doing "The Tax on Living," the Republican-American's team cannibalized computer models of state, local and school budgets that had originally been constructed for other stories. Each was updated and interlocked with new elements, such as the federal budget.

Armed with Laptops

At the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors convention last summer, several of America's finest journalists jokingly discussed ambushing and robbing Republican-American reporters. We carried powerful, $2,000 notebook computers; they made do with equipment, to put it charitably, whose manuals might as well have been written in hieroglyphics.

It's easy to fill out purchase orders: Just write down all the high-powered goodies you want. It takes more courage to sign purchase orders for computer-assisted equipment during a period that has seen dailies shut down all over the country.

Republican-American Publisher William J. Pape II signed the orders over the past two years for more than $30,000 for hardware to be used for computer-assisted journalism. (Some of the machines are also used for pagination and various other newsroom functions.) Pape notes that it's taken newsrooms only about two decades to catch up to the computer age; in the early 1970s, he points out, businesses everywhere were moving their accounting departments to computers and using that new power to analyze their budgets. Newsrooms, meanwhile, were still reporting each government budget as if it were independent of its predecessors.

Pape says the budget work going on in newspaper business departments gave him an idea. Why not use those same techniques to analyze government finances? He didn't have many resources at the time; a project of that size would have to be done on a mainframe and minicomputers. But just a decade later, desktop machines and commercial software such as Lotus 1-2-3 made his plans more practical.

Now Republican-American reporters wander Connecticut armed with laptops. And Pape and Executive Editor Bill Southerland approved the Computer Journalism Department staffed by me and three reporters. The goal is to bring the power of computers to everyone in the newsroom.

"There are enormous amounts of information out there. Reporters can't keep it all in their back pockets," Pape says. "But with a laptop computer, you can stuff in tons of data. They empower reporters."

Now What?

Getting the first few projects off the ground is easy. Reporters at the Indianapolis-based National Institute for Advanced Reporting, run by the School of Journalism at Indiana University and by Purdue University, say they often see newspapers do a few small projects and then lose momentum. Other outlets send people to every conference on the planet without ever actually doing anything. Perhaps the hardest step is not the first, but the step from beginner's projects to "The Tax on Living."

So what makes a great computer-assisted journalism project? If you are a successful journalist, you already know: the same elements that make great stories done without a computer. In the end, readers just don't care if you do a story on a multimillion dollar Cray or a $3.98 calculator – as long as it's interesting. Who wouldn't read a story comparing your school and city bus driver rosters with your state's drunk driving conviction lists?

The results of such reporting are sometimes limited by journalists' commitment. Many people are surprised to find how much work is involved. The traditional method of covering city and state finances is simple: Pick up the budget and call an official for an explanation. Then call the leader of the opposition for a critical comment. Then start typing.

Of course, there are a few problems with this system. For one thing, you are forced to rely on numbers supplied by politicians. There's no other choice. The annual federal budget runs some 12,000 pages. And if you can analyze that sort of data in your head on deadline and then ask intelligent questions – please, send me a résumé.

What you can do instead is build a model of the budget on a computer and feed the figures in with a scanner. Then you can confront the politicians with numbers that haven't been massaged by flacks. You can force politicians to answer tough questions, rather than formulate sound bites.

Isn't that why we're in the business? l