On the Beat   

Computer-assisted reproting isn't just for projects anymore.

When a corruption scandal hit the South Hackensack, New Jersey, police department, Bergen Record reporter Deborah Privitera set out to get local reaction.

But before Privitera hit the streets, she stopped at her desk and typed "DO CENSUS" into her computer terminal. With a few keystrokes, she called up a U.S. Census Bureau profile of the blue-collar, ethnic town just 12 miles from Manhattan on Interstate 80.

"I punched in DO CENSUS and learned it was a township of 2,100, half of whom were Italian, and the rest a mixture of other nationalities," Privitera recalls. "From that I could tell that it was a very small neighborhood and ethnically diverse; the education and employment data gave me even more of a sense of what the township was like."

Alan Cox, a reporter at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis remembers a day last spring when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention questioned the wisdom of giving 16- and 17-year-olds driving permits.

"I sorted nine years' worth of Minnesota death records to look for teen traffic fatalities. Using Census Bureau CD-ROMs, I calculated accident rates, and mapped them by county," he says. "Within a few hours, I could show that teens in rural Minnesota were most at risk..and that we were entering the time of year with the greatest risk. It was the night that most Twin Cities high schools held graduation ceremonies, so the story led the broadcast."

Computer-assisted reporting – it's not just for projects anymore.

The same techniques that fueled Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations for the last six years can also help beat reporters – the ones churning out three stories a day, along with features and enterprise – add color and depth to their efforts. Journalists around the country are learning that a few keystrokes can often make the difference between routine efforts and real insight. It doesn't take much time and it often doesn't take lots of extra effort. All it takes is the willingness to learn a few new tricks and – perhaps more important – the flexibility to adopt new ways of thinking about old problems.

With tools like the Record's DO CENSUS, with free or inexpensive computer programs that let journalists quickly do the calculations or analyses that give context to stories, and with more powerful (but easy to use) spreadsheets or databases that calculate or sort data instantaneously, reporters can dig into stories in ways they never have before. And though computer-assisted reporting (CAR) on the beat may not be a fixture in every newsroom yet, the best and most ambitious reporters are adding it to their repertoires and using it to advance their careers in much the same way that reporters with VDT experience had an advantage during the transition from typewriters to computers.

"What CAR allows people to do on deadline and on their beat reporting is to relatively quickly collate information and analyze it," says Brant Houston, a former database editor at the Hartford Courant who last year became managing director of the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR), based at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism. "That adds a lot more depth to their reporting and allows them to ask much better questions of people who are involved in the story. That rests at the heart of good reporting – just knowing the right questions to ask."

Ralph Frammolino learned just how much knowing the right question to ask could help a day after completing a week-long NICAR-sponsored seminar at the Los Angeles Times last fall. Before the workshop, the Times reporter says he had only "tinkered" with computers. But literally minutes after returning to the newsroom, he was confronted by a deadline story that would not have been possible without CAR.

It was about, of all things, jury selection on the O.J. Simpson trial.

"It was truly instant gratification," says Frammolino. "We had a week-long boot camp where 10 of us, reporters and editors, were put through pretty rigorous training. And of course we were fascinated and kind of titillated by the kind of high-powered stories that had been done."

With visions of databases dancing in his head, Frammolino returned to the newsroom Monday morning.

"Before you can say 'Pentium,' my editor is chasing me down, saying, 'I need your help, I need your help. They've winnowed out the first members of the jury. We've got to find out who are these lucky people left.' ..I looked her in the eye and said, 'I've got exactly what you need. I'll use the computer.' "

What followed was a few hours of keyboarding as a Times researcher dictated to Frammolino portions of the lengthy questionnaire potential jurors had filled out, public information in California. Frammolino frantically typed the material into Microsoft Access, the database package he had learned only the week before. By deadline that day, the pair had entered 30 separate facts about each remaining member of the jury pool, including demographic items such as race, gender, address, education and employment. Potential jurors also were asked if they had heard recordings of Nicole Simpson's frantic call to 911; if they had seen video of the police chasing O.J. Simpson on L.A. freeways; and how they viewed the reliability of DNA testing. Once the information was entered, it took just a few minutes to come up with some quick analyses.

"We were able that first day not to come out with a stand-alone story, but really to add a lot of depth and texture to that first story. It was very helpful for the graphics and the chart," says Frammolino. "Most striking to me was that something like 92 percent of the pool had seen O.J. in the slow Bronco chase, but something like less than 50 percent had ever seen him play football, when he was in his glory."

The next day other Los Angeles area newspapers, working from paper records, were able to present only the most rudimentary analyses, observing simply that the remaining jury pool contained mostly African Americans who might be more suspicious of police and favor Simpson.

Frammolino began to wonder who was being dropped from the pool and, more important, why. Many, of course, had been removed because they'd violated Judge Lance A. Ito's order to avoid media coverage of trial preliminaries. But Frammolino got an insight into the Simpson defense team's strategy.

"It was very clear that the people being excluded were the ones more likely to believe in DNA evidence, and also that they were more educated people," he says. "Why is that important? Because the entire prosecution case relies on the test results."

Thus the Times was able to run a comprehensive story on the fine art of jury selection, including comment from experts on the thinking that might lie behind the lawyers' tactics.

"If we had to do this by hand, with 30 different fields [categories of information], I don't think we would have gotten to it," Frammolino says.

Quickly finding elusive data is what CAR on the beat is all about. And to make it possible, newsroom tools such as DO CENSUS and computers mounted with database programs like Access or Paradox and spreadsheets like Excel or Quattro are increasingly common – or should be.

DO CENSUS is just one program that encourages beat reporters to access computerized information. Built by a Bergen Record editor who noticed that the CD-ROMs sold by the Census Bureau contain canned "profiles" of states, counties or municipalities, it took only a couple of days to compile basic information on the demographics, economy, housing stock and labor force for the 100 or so towns the Record covers. Then it was simply a matter of convincing the Record's mainframe computer mavens to mount the profiles on the ATEX system the newsroom uses to write and edit stories, though the data could as easily have been put on a desktop PC. Very quickly, reporters and editors began to use DO CENSUS every day.

Any newsroom with a desktop computer that can handle Microsoft Windows or a Macintosh can acquire a slew of other free or low-cost programs to make reporters' lives easier. They include:

G A program to calculate the impact of inflation: Developed at the Raleigh News & Observer (see "The Digitized Newsroom," January/February) and improved at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, this tool lets a reporter enter the amount spent in one year and see what it is worth in another year. It's a quick, easy way to check an official's claim that a seemingly enormous increase in the amount of a city budget, for example, is really "just keeping up with inflation."

G A weights-and-measures conversion program developed by a staffer at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina that translates anything from cubits to light years into more common measurements: It can help reporters explain to readers (or to themselves) what it really means when a scientist says something is 100 light years away.

G Another program, also developed at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, that quickly calculates that bane of journalists, the percentage change between two numbers: It's very handy for reporters who need to state the percentage by which taxes will increase this year over last.

G A program developed mostly for pilots and frequent fliers that calculates the distance and flying time between some 900 airports around the globe: This might be used to add detail to stories about faraway events.

G A simple tool that could be built in any newsroom to help reporters analyze local budgets: By using a spreadsheet to enter budget amounts for this year and next, it becomes a simple matter to see what internal items might have increased or decreased dramatically, perhaps much more or less than the budget as a whole. Reporters can then use the inflation calculator to see whether the percentage change seems reasonable.

Alan Cox at WCCO-TV is one of only a handful of television reporters doing CAR on deadline stories. He says this is because of television's need for visuals, a problem he encountered when preparing his report on teen traffic fatalities.

"Using 9-track tape, a database program, a spreadsheet program, a CD-ROM extract program and mapping software kept me glued to my chair," he says. "A field producer and a photographer visited a driving school for video and interviews to flesh out the story. I couldn't have done it without them."

CAR on television brings other challenges, because it requires another level of technology to bring the results of reporters' work to the TV screen. That technology can be difficult to master.

"When I did my story live on the air for our early broadcast, I used a [graphics] program, and I indulged in adding a computery sound effect to play when the graphics came on screen," he recalls. "In my haste, I embedded it improperly. When I called it up on the air, error boxes repeatedly popped up. I'd always planned to make a joke about technology if something went wrong during a live report, but given the subject matter, it seemed like the wrong time. I don't use that sound effect much anymore."

Still, Cox does not hesitate to use computer resources, even when they don't lend themselves precisely to traditional television. The night of the USAir crash in Pittsburgh he used a CD-ROM containing Federal Aviation Administration records of the downed plane's service history and accessed online services to get information on the aircraft's model.

"Television newsrooms tend to have limited printed reference materials, and the online sources are helpful in a crush," he says. "There was no time to compare the number of maintenance problems we found for that specific plane with similar makes and models. But in a way that tight deadline struck a chord with viewers. Because there was no time to put the information into a standard television graphic, I showed and read the records on the air directly from a database program. I later got calls from reporters at other news organizations, from a couple of airline employees and from a few home computer buffs wanting to know how to do the same thing."

Heather Newman, a City Hall and urban affairs reporter for the Tucson Citizen in Arizona, uses CAR techniques to help her with her routine coverage.

Newman uses a database program as her Rolodex, keeping a continually updated list of names, addresses and phone numbers for everyone who sits on a city committee and a list of neighborhood association activists that lets her select a source by name, area of the city and other criteria. She uses her word processor to keep the minutes and reports from City Council meetings, enabling her to quickly call up the history of a council action.

"We needed to do a snap profile on a councilman who has been involved in an alleged kickback scandal," says Newman. "He had run on a strong campaign of neighborhood support. Having the neighborhood associations typed in enabled us to immediately pull the names of people representing all associations in his ward, allowing us to call them to see how he had kept up on his promises."

Neill Borowski, director of computer-assisted reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer, rattles off a list of other ways beat reporters use CAR, noting that his newspaper encourages the quick-hit daily and the in-depth Sunday CAR story.

In one case, a correspondent phoned 44 public high schools, asking them to fax a list of colleges to which graduating seniors were accepted and how many went to each one.

"We in turn built a spreadsheet – it could have been a database, too – reflecting several thousand college-bound seniors..and found the hot colleges," Borowski says. "The story interviewed admissions counselors from those colleges and the graphics listed both the hottest colleges overall as well as the hot colleges at individual high schools."

For another story, the same correspondent made her job even easier. Rather than call each school with her request, she entered the principals' names and fax numbers into a program on her PC that sends a computer file as a fax.

"She wrote the letter asking her questions, set the fax on automatic and it sent out 44 faxes without a care. The reporter went on vacation for a week and came back to a pile of faxes with answers from the high schools," says Borowski. "Is this CAR? Sure it is. It is using the computer as a tool to facilitate reporting."

To encourage its staff to use computer-assisted reporting, the Inquirer established what it calls "Bit-by-Bit University." In the last year, more than 200 reporters and editors have studied everything from basic PC training to spreadsheets to databases to the Internet.

"The success stories are the people who can't wait to leave the classes and try to apply what they have learned," says Borowski. "In some ways, we're seeing the same reluctance to change that we saw in the mid-'70s when most newsrooms moved from typewriters to VDTs. The younger people quickly adapted. Some older editors never could change over, while others embraced the new technology and began to work on ways they could squeeze the most productivity out of it. We're seeing that now with CAR." l