When I attended the MICAR seminar in February, I would have never guessed that the Greensboro News & Record's first computer-assisted reporting project would reach Biblical proportions. But when 1,053 Greensboro citizens responded to a News & Record survey on sin, our computer-assisted reporting program realized its genesis. The Sin Survey and the idea of using the computer on it were the brainchildren of our religion editor, who understands the theory of computer-assisted reporting because she keeps up with the latest trends and is married to me.
One thing the News & Record wanted to emphasize was letting our news agenda determine how we would use the computer, not vice versa. The Sin Survey followed naturally from that. Greensboro, N.C. is in the heart of the Bible Belt (home to one of the Presbyterian Church's five largest congregations in the U.S.). The News & Record has covered religion as a standing beat for many years, and we have carried or written many stories this year about mainline religious denominations that are struggling publicly with such issues as whether to ordain acknowledged gay men and lesbians.
We emphasize reader participation in our news stories, so the reader survey was a logical idea we've done plenty of them before on other subjects. The new twist was using the computer. As I mentioned, in the two weeks we allowed, we received 1,053 responses. Our most popular previous survey - on soap operas drew only about 700 responses. We got more after the deadline that we didn't use. The survey, originally published on the religion page, and then repeated one week later in our local news section, asked readers whether each of 20 listed behaviors was a sin.
It also asked readers to rank the Ten Commandments in order of how important they were to obey, and to rank the seven deadly sins in order of deadliness. Readers also were asked to supply their sex, age bracket and religious denomination, and to say whether or not they were clergy members and whether they regularly attended worship services. We also asked readers to define sin in essay form, but those responses were not tabulated by the computer.
Using a Dell 325P and XDB, I set up a table for responses, taking yes or no responses for the 20 items and ranking the commandments and deadly sins using numerical values so that we could determine averages. Asking people to rank the most important commandment as number one meant using golf-type scoring. The lower a commandment's average numerical value, the more important it was considered by respondents.
We were looking for relative value of commandments and sins, SO if someone said all commandments were equally important to obey, I gave each a value of one. If someone said it was not important to obey any of them (and some did), I gave each a value of 10. I checked the age brackets and sex against the 1990 Census Survey Tape File 1A data for our 11-county coverage area to determine how our survey respondents deviated from the population at large.
I'll be the first to admit that using computer-assisted reporting like this is like driving a Lamborghini to the corner for a six-pack and a bag of Doritos. It was worth the effort though, for several reasons. First, the survey touched our readers like no other we've ever done. Second, because of that response, tabulating the survey by hand would have been a nightmare. Third, it was a way to finally get a computer-assisted project into the paper.
After eight months of living Murphy's Law, I'll take it. Finally, getting something into the paper got more of my co-workers interested in the computer - particularly the senior editors with budgeting authority.