The Digitized Newsroom   

The Raleigh News & Observer shows how powerful databases, online research, and the new approaches to reporting and writing they encourage, are reshaping journalism.

It sounds so simple. Begin with a typical metropolitan newspaper newsroom – perhaps the staff is a little younger than at peer papers, but not noticeably different in most respects. Now, give serious thought to the computer and communication equipment that promises to revolutionize the news, information and entertainment industries. What if staffers could master these machines, making their use routine inside the newsroom rather than merely a topic they write about?

Welcome to the Raleigh News & Observer, one of America's few remaining family-owned newspapers. The N&O, as it's known, has been introducing its reporters to these new tools over the past few years. While its venture is clearly a work in progress, Raleigh offers a comprehensive look at how digitized information and new approaches to reporting and writing stories could reshape the nation's newsrooms.

At the N&O and other technology-friendly papers, the reporter's craft is changing, as are the roles of news librarians and other staff members. Team journalism, although not driven by technology alone, is becoming especially prevalent in newsrooms that make heavy use of computers. And such collective efforts in a digital era are regularly producing definitive stories that can pass muster as social science as well as journalism. The computer, once reserved for big investigative projects, is becoming a commonplace ally of beat reporters doing routine stories.

Readers are using computers and modems, too, and they have become active participants in Raleigh's Internet forays as well as in virtually every online forum involving news organizations. The interactive nature of online communication is changing how stories are reported. Perhaps more important, interactivity may fundamentally change the relationship between journalists and the people they cover.

The editors and reporters at the N&O have thousands of counterparts at papers across the country. Nearly every newsroom is blessed with a cadre of technologically savvy, highly motivated journalists who are trying to pull their institutions into new arenas. But what sets Raleigh apart is the fact that digitized information skills – for using computers, databases, online services – are becoming standard for nearly everyone in the newsroom. There are about 100 computer work stations now available to the roughly 150 professional newsroom staffers at the N&O, and Executive Editor Frank Daniels III says every staff member will have a personal computer by this summer.

Several related developments underscore differences between the N&O newsroom and industry norms:

• The paper's 21-person News Research Department has created a network of databases, many built by N&O staffers, that can be accessed from computer work stations.

• Staffers in news research and in the N&O's 17-person New Media Department write software programs, which are often needed to create research pathways into valuable but inaccessible databases.

• The paper has turned a database that tracks bills in the state legislature into a successful online subscription service, which N&O executives see as a prototype for other profitable ventures.

• The paper is in its third generation of hypertext software, which allows writers on special projects to search their own notes much as they would an outside database.

• The N&O is getting involved with multimedia. The first effort included a series of feature stories in the paper, audiotext offerings on the paper's telephone information service and online stories that included text, audio and video elements. The series was done in collaboration with local TV stations, which aired their own versions of the stories.

• Finally, like a growing number of papers, the N&O has created an electronic version. But instead of affiliating with America Online, Prodigy or another commercial service, it started its own online service and has linked it to the Internet, providing a broad array of information for electronic readers.

The N&O's transformation into the premier digital daily dates to the naming of Frank Daniels III as executive editor in late 1990. The N&O, with roots back to 1865, has been owned by the Daniels family for a century. Josephus Daniels bought the paper in 1894 for $10,000 and ran it for more than 50 years. His grandson, Frank Daniels Jr., is now the publisher.

When Frank Daniels III was appointed to his position, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms was waging a brutal reelection campaign against former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, the Democratic challenger. The younger Daniels was struck by the Helms camp's sophistication in using computer and communications technology.

"That was the galvanizing factor" in getting the N&O into computers, Daniels says. "The Helms team beat the hell out of the news media... In political campaigns, our competition is not the other media but the campaigns. And since the 1970s, they've been beating us... It made me realize how stupid we were, and I don't like feeling stupid."

Neither did longtime N&O reporter Pat Stith, who took an 18-month sabbatical to, in Daniels' words, "explore what could be done with these tools from a reporting standpoint." Stith worked closely with Lany McDonald, then head of the N&O library. The library became the News Research Department, and has been expanded under McDonald's successor, Teresa Leonard.

Much of the progress at the N&O was sparked in late 1992, when the paper hired two database experts. This was the beginning of a restructuring that doubled the number of employees in the N&O News Research Department and tripled its budget. One of those experts was Dan Woods, a computer science major who, after several years in the computer industry, got a master's degree in journalism. Woods says he had perhaps five counterparts at other papers when he joined the N&O. He estimates there are now about 20 newspaper database editors.

Woods provides N&O reporters with information culled from databases, but he spends most of his time helping to create the large pool of networked databases from which the entire staff can draw. Much of this work, he says, involves the arduous task of writing computer codes and laboriously "cleaning" data so it can be used in the newsroom.

Reporters don't just rely on Woods and his staff, though. Everyone in the newsroom is encouraged to learn computer skills. Further, Stith says, the N&O "decided that computer analysis of databases would not be limited to 'investigative' stories, or even major projects. We intend to benefit from economy of scale. We are going to use databases to create or improve everyday front page stories and second fronts."

Computer literacy is voluntary, but management has made it clear it will grant resources and opportunities to those who learn such skills. To prod its staff, the N&O provides interest-free loans for members who want to buy their own PCs; more than $500,000 has been loaned so far. The paper also keeps track of computer literacy rates: Computer skills are included on formal job performance evaluations.

Most newspapers have introduced computers into the newsroom through small reporting teams, usually composed of investigative project reporters. What sets the N&O apart is the extent to which computer skills are used in daily coverage.

"I haven't seen an effort on the level of Raleigh's anywhere," says Philip Meyer, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a pioneer in computer-assisted journalism. Meyer says he prefers the Raleigh model for other newspapers, "but there may not be enough talent available at the price that newspapers have historically been willing to pay."

Still, it's a new era. Many younger journalists are computer literate. Coincidentally, many newsrooms are replacing their aged text-editing systems, which generally can't be used for even simple computing tasks. And a high percentage of these papers will be installing PC-based systems, providing a stimulus to develop new communication tools.

At the N&O, the routine use of computer tools owes much to the paper's efforts to develop and update databases that can provide quick information and context even for spot news. For example, the N&O's Computer-Assisted Reporting Network, called CARnet, contains electronic versions of several phone and public sector personnel directories; economic and demographic information; and extensive data on state and county government property, tax and business records, and motor vehicle information. Another useful database, other than the aforementioned legislative tracking system, is the N&O list of contributors to major state political races. Called the Money Machine, it is updated regularly and can be searched by contributors' names.

Beyond these powerful tools, there's another major distinction between the N&O and other newsrooms, namely the central role played by its news library, now called the News Research Department.

Unlike the newsroom, says Daniels, the news library can serve several masters without ethical or pragmatic conflicts. It can help create and maintain a database on state legislation that reporters find invaluable, for example, and then also help turn that database into a for-profit product sold outside the newspaper. And with revenues from such ventures becoming increasingly necessary to pay for the digital newsroom, Daniels sees the importance of creating an efficient way to do this.

The N&O's Teresa Leonard says that having the resources to assemble and maintain databases has been a major benefit of expanding the News Research Department. "Because of the way we're organizing and keeping track of what's coming in, we're able to keep track of things that otherwise would be too much trouble to keep track of," she says. "It has allowed us to create stories that otherwise wouldn't have been there."

Nora Paul, former library director at the Miami Herald and now director of the news research program at the Poynter Institute, has noted that a number of newsrooms are developing cooperative relationships among reporters, editors and library researchers. "For the possibilities of online research and computer-assisted reporting to be fully and successfully explored," she said in a 1993 speech, "I believe that librarians need to define and enhance their role and that librarians and reporters need to forge a whole new relationship."

Those enhancements include working with reporters and editors to evaluate data sources even before stories have been assigned or defined, doing actual reporting on secondary research sources, training newsroom personnel in database and online searching skills, acquiring and developing databases, and coordinating newsroom information systems. Raleigh is doing all of these things and Paul says its research operations are unparalleled.

One of the major changes made possible by computer-assisted journalism is that newsrooms no longer have to depend on outside sources for information. The day of the story based on two sources and a press release is over.

For example, when the N&O did a story on repeat offenders who clog state and local jails, it "analyzed how many misdemeanants have cycled through the system more than 10 times," explains Metro staff writer Steve Riley. "We found 185 of them. There was no way else to find those people. The old way to do that story is to ask someone at the prison. This way you find them yourself. You don't have to rely on someone else to tell you what news is."

Executive Editor Daniels feels strongly that newsrooms need to be able to define the news, not just reflect self-interested statements from skilled spin doctors. This ability, he adds, will help newspapers maintain their attractiveness as information providers in an era when raw hard news is available from a growing number of electronic news services.

Daniels' comments echo the work of the University of North Carolina's Philip Meyer, who has written extensively about journalists' need to develop statistical and related social science skills. The traditional passive approach of the reporter to covering the news must give way, Meyer believes, with newspapers becoming more comfortable setting the news agenda.

"The old ethic of media passivity encourages most journalists to sit back and let government or special interest groups take over the role of information processor," he says. "For media to rely on interest groups, even public-spirited ones, for information processing is dangerous."

Tom Koch, a writer and consultant, also sees technology changing the traditional relationship between the journalist and his source and, ultimately, the nature of journalism itself.

"Online data technologies empower writers and reporters by providing them with information equal to or greater than that possessed by the public or private official they are assigned to interview," he wrote in his 1991 book, "Journalism for the 21st Century: Online Information, Electronic Databases and the News."

"The effects of this empowerment," he says, "will eventually redefine the form of the news...and of public information in general."

If digitized technologies are contributing to changes in the type of journalism practiced in newsrooms, they also seem to be playing a role in how those newsrooms are staffed. That's because journalism is becoming a team sport.

Historically, Meyer notes, reporters were bred to be independent and often isolated observers who were detached from the consequences of their work. They didn't interact much with the communities they covered. They were given a lot of freedom, but not much money. "The economics of the newspaper business therefore pushed the journalist toward the characteristic moral profile: a lone hero wandering from market to market like the archetypal cowboy of the movies, settling scores on behalf of the common man against the rich and the powerful," Meyer said in a 1990 speech.

This profile, however, is at odds with new information technologies, says Meyer. Computer-assisted reporting requires a team approach.

"The new media are team products," he says. "Increasingly, there is less room for the lone-hero, reporter-as-cowboy figure."

Multimedia projects especially demand team efforts. The N&O made its first foray into this uncharted territory last summer with a 16-week series called "North Carolina Discoveries." The series, which focused on state topics, ran in the paper, aired on local radio and television, and was uploaded onto the Internet via NandO, the paper's online service.

This joint effort entailed multiple interviews for the different formats. The participating TV stations did their own interviews while the N&O shot still photographs and gathered its own audio material. These were used for the N&O's own multimedia effort on NandO. The paper also used the audio material on its audiotex information service.

N&O reporter Julie Ann Powers points out that the project required broadcast skills that are unfamiliar to traditional print reporters. "From the very beginning of the process it [the reporting] is different," she says. "I had to think in terms of sound and motion as well as whether it would support a full length story in the paper." Sound, which is not a factor for print stories, proved a major new concern, she says, as did the need to compensate for the lack of visual elements in radio stories and, to some extent, print stories. She needed to pose questions that would elicit answers in a form suitable for recording, she explains, whereas her traditional interview style was much more conversational.

N&O State Editor Ben Estes stresses that the series, which was a "valuable experience," was still a test run. "I view this in a lot of ways as an experiment getting us ready for things to come," Estes says. "Eventually, I want to be able to do this on all stories."

Estes also notes that coordinating all the series' elements was difficult and extremely time-consuming. "The tradeoff," he says, "is that Julie is doing one story a week instead of five, and I'm editing one story a week."

Although multimedia efforts may require new skills and approaches to reporting, the most far-reaching impact of digitized information will likely stem from its interactivity. Readers talk in cyberspace. They become instant critics, sounding boards and easily reachable sources.

Raleigh's NandO is developing new services to interact with the public. For example, NandO staffers have created Nando Land for children and have made it available for free at local schools. The service will both acclimate teachers and students to the world of online and give the N&O a better idea of how to appeal to a generation that has become increasingly disinterested in traditional newspaper content.

Bruce Siceloff is the newsroom online editor who works with N&O staffers to provide, among other things, a digitized edition of each day's paper. Online journalism and interactivity are new to the paper, Siceloff says. And while he wants newsroom staffers to "start dreaming in different media," he acknowledges that this evolution will require more staff familiarity with online tools, particularly the Internet and its increasingly powerful software aids.

Another way that newsroom types will be "engaged" in the online world, Siceloff hopes, will occur as they find themselves participating in two-way communication with readers. Such interaction is a staple of online life but print journalists generally aren't used to the kind of probing, constant online chatter that fills cyberspace. Siceloff and his counterparts at other newspapers believe this interactivity will have a major impact on the profession.

ýf the 1990 elections were a major factor prompting the N&O's interest in using technology to bolster its reporting, it might be fair to say that the 1994 elections created an equally strong mandate for using new information tools to communicate better with an alienated electorate.

The elections revealed how unhappy and disconnected voters feel, and the paper, in the spirit of "public journalism," wants to foster community participation in the electoral process. Siceloff says in future campaigns the N&O will use its online tools to stimulate communication among voters, government and the press. Beyond interactive discussions, the paper will provide voters online data on candidates and issues, and help them do their own online digging for additional information.

Such efforts will include material on Internet's World Wide Web, which permits the use of sound, still photos and graphics, and full-motion video, as well as text and E-mail services. This is a major improvement over NandO's early Internet offerings, which were limited to a text-only electronic version of the N&O daily paper and a range of bulletin board services.

On the Web, as it's called, the N&O now is posting an impressive display of multimedia content (the N&O's Web address is http://www.nando.net"). Online content includes several newspaper projects, such as the 16-part "North Carolina Discoveries" series; the NandO Times, a daily electronic edition of the paper; NandO's Entertainment Server, with listings of area movies, concerts and other community events; and a User's Guide to the Triangle, which features databases of information on the region.

Other N&O Web products aren't directly related to the newspaper. Sports information services are available. There's a service called Music Kitchen, which features text, images and sound cuts from a number of rock bands. And NandO is working with a travel agency to offer airline reservations and no-fee ticket services over the Internet. With the Internet's global audience, these products give the N&O access to consumers – and revenue opportunities – far beyond its circulation area.

Although the Internet is a different entity than a newspaper, NandO's new online products are an extension of the dramatic changes taking place in the N&O newsroom and its research library.

"Once you create digital information you can do anything with it," says Executive Editor Daniels. "And once you build the infrastructure for that, assuming you don't skimp, you can support much more than your news department with it."

It's Daniels' systemic approach that differentiates the N&O from other newspapers. "You've got good stuff going on in most every other newsroom in the country, but there's no synergy to it," Daniels says. "They're not helping their newspapers evolve, and that's what this is all about: How do you help the company evolve?" l