Last year when reporters at the Boston Herald decided to look into state election campaign contributions, they found more than they bargained for.
They stumbled into the problems associated with data entry that many reporters working on computer-assisted projects have come up against- cost, time and accuracy.
Campaign contribution records in Massachussets, like many other states, are not computerized. They are available only as paper copies.
This can slow down or put off reporters interested in the data because a large amount of time must be spent putting the information into an easily manageable database format.
"We considered hiring people internally to do the data entry, but there were too many problems," said David Armstrong, a reporter at the Boston Herald. "We'd need a large number of people, computers and time for them to work on them and someone to watch over them. That wasn't feasible.
"Not every paper is like the L.A. Times which can hire an army of data entry folks and pay $80,000 to get the job done."
After speaking with other reporters, the Herald hired Capitol Micro Systems in Ohio, which charged them 13 cents a record, $8,000 total, and no consulting fee.
"There were numerous problems with the statewide records, but we could fix them ourselves," Armstrong said. "There were multiple entries of the same record, bogus amounts such as $30,000 donations instead of $3,000, and incorrect spellings of businesses and places."
Herald reporters did some data entry themselves to determine possible problem areas in the data, Armstrong said.
When the reporters looked into the mayoral campaign contributions they encountered a more serious problem, Armstrong said.
According to the database there were no contributions for the mayoral campaign from the suburbs or towns surrounding Boston, yet the addresses of some contributors were definitely in surrounding suburbs and towns. The reporters learned that the data entry company had used a zip code program that replaced the actual suburb or town name with Boston. The database was sent back to the company to correct this, but when it came back
"It's a fool that doesn't verify the data he gets," Houston said. "If you don't enter it into the computer yourself, you need to verify it when you get it."