The cost of computerized information may be a stumbling block for some medium- and small-circulation papers interested in doing computer-assisted reporting.
That's the problem that Jane Martin, a reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, encountered while doing a drunk driving story for the 72,000 circulation daily.
"I was laboriously working by notebook going over old (criminal court) files when I realized that we ought to buy the tape," she said.
Martin talked to her boss and told her to find out how much the nine-track magnetic tape would cost.
The tape, which contained criminal case filings from 1985 to 1989, cost $784.
"That's when I ran into a roadblock," she said.
Because the county's computer system is older, additional programming was required before the Caller-Times could obtain the tapes. The extra programming increased the overall cost of the tapes, according to Martin.
But what happened to Martin doesn't have to happen to reporters at all small papers. Pat Stith, reporter for the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., said that most tapes acquired by the paper from state and county governments have cost about $30. "Our most expensive tapes were the Federal Election Commission tapes for $417," he said. "We've gotten some tapes for nothing," Stith said. "(In) some places we've pulled out a few diskettes, popped them into the computer and had the information in minutes.
According to Martin, smaller towns may also be reluctant to provide the information on magnetic tape because they are not familiar with FOIA requests and FOIA law.
"They say no without knowing what they're saying no to," Martin said.
Under the Texas Open Records Law, a judge decides how and in what format government documents will be released.
In Martin's case, she met with the district judge, a clerk and the sheriff to talk about her request.
"I told them I was not looking for subjective information about juveniles or anything else," Martin said.
Once they understood the request, they released the information, she said.
Reporters have to go through that process with every agency they approach, Stith said.
"Each time we've gone to a new agency it's been a new ballgame," Stith said. "We've done very little repeat business so far but when we go back, things go smoothly."
Stith also advises newspapers to look for a central processing agency that handles the computer chores for the city, county or state, because it saves time and more importantly cuts costs.
Newspapers starting a computer-assisted reporting program should try to get one 486 computer with a gigabyte hard drive, because it will give them the capability to do a large database project and run programs quickly, Stith said.
For Martin's drunk driving story, two computer systems at the Caller-Times were used. The 6250 BPI tape was downloaded into three smaller tapes at 6250 BPI. Then programmers downloaded these tapes into a database on a Hewlett-Packard 3000 mainframe. After that they downloaded the information onto a 386 PC with a 100 megabyte hard drive.
Ray Motta, manager of operations at the Caller-Times, said the newspaper leases its equipment — one mainframe, four word processors, five disk drives and four tape drives.
Martin also ran into a cost problem when she tried to get tapes from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers about shipping ports. They quoted her a price of $750 to $1250 to get the tapes.
"As the government puts more and more information on magnetic tape, I'm just afraid the cost is going to knock out the smaller media," Martin said.
Lisa Touye' of MICAR contributed to this report.