Van Denton, a beat reporter for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, was doing a routine assignment. He didn't need to look for a faster way. But he did, and he ended up with much more than a routine story. All it took was a newly formed database and a floppy disk.
Every year, Denton's paper does a story on the amount of money lobbyists spend wining and dining legislators. The information was only available on hard copy, which required searching through voluminous documentation, making calculations and coming out with a story in a couple of weeks.
Denton started early, looked around a little and found person in the secretary of state's office who was building a database with all the needed information. A couple of weeks later, when all the data was in, he took a floppy disk down to the secretary and had the file copied, at no cost to the newspaper.
His story was ready two days later and included not only how much lobbyists spent, in total and per legislator, but also was broken down by interest group, such as medicine or insurance. He got a better, more complex story, in less time.
There are hundreds of examples of reporters who have done in-depth investigations over months, or even years, using computer-assisted reporting. However, reporters all over the country, from North Carolina to Washington state, are turning over stories in a week or less with the help of a database and some creative thinking. These reporters are putting out faster, harder-hitting stories long before their competition.
Here's a simple rule to follow: If you're going through volumes of documents, ask if there's a tape somewhere. Then find someone who knows what to do with it.
Pat Stith has been The News & Observer's computer expert for the past two years. He said the paper put out 31 articles in the past year using computer-assisted reporting. Also, a 20-hour training program was set up to remove the mystique for beat reporters.
Denton took the course, which he said made him aware of possibilities of this technique. On the lobby story, he was faced with 866 reports to be analyzed over the course of a couple of weeks. He looked for another way. Then he found out about the database at the secretary of state's office.
On a Wednesday, Denton got a copy of the database and brought it back to Stith in the newsroom. Stith said the "little bitty database," a flat file, took "five seconds" to load into Foxpro. Reports were ready for Denton to take home by the end of the day.
Denton had requested reports on many possible combinations of the information. When he went through the reports that Wednesday night, he tagged all the special interest groups. The next morning, Stith created a new field for groups, such as oil, insurance and medicine, and printed more reports calculating amount spent by each group.
Denton did follow-up interviews and had the story ready on Friday. But it ran on Sunday's front page, because, after all, they were weeks ahead of their competition.
"I'm more interested in something I can use every day," said Denton. "It's just a tool to get a story like any other tool."
Penny Loeb of New York Newsday made it through 500 pages of a 1,000-page document before she thought, "This has got to be on a tape somewhere." Sure enough, it was.
She and Kevin Flynn were investigating allegations that attorneys were making contributions to Attorney General Robert Abrams' campaign for the U.S. Senate while they had business pending with his office. The reporters discovered that Abrams had received more than $120,000 for his campaign from attorneys who do business with his office, including $33,000 from lawyers who had matters pending before him at the time of the contributions.
After six hours of searching through documents, Loeb looked for a tape. She got a tape from the attorney general's office, but a record layout, telling her how to load it, was not included. She counted some fields and made her own record layout. She loaded the tape in about two hours.
With the tape, Loeb could immediately go into the database and see names of attorneys who had pending business.
Loeb printed two sets of reports, one from the attorney general's list of pending business and one from the Federal Election Committee's list of campaign contributions. Since neither list identified law firms, she had to do a little creative thinking.
Loeb asked herself what distinguishing characteristics are in law firms' names. Of course - ampersands! She printed reports of all occupations with ampersands in the company name. Then she went through both lists by hand, matching up the names.
Loeb loaded the tape on Friday, Aug. 28. By the following day, she had identified 12 instances of lawyers making contributions while they had matters pending. However, she wasn't sure she had the right firms.
On Tuesday, Sept. 1, she and Flynn got on the phones to the law firms to interview them and confirm the data. Loeb said this took three days and was the most time-consuming part of the story.
By Friday, Sept. 4, the writing was done. The story was scheduled for Sunday the 6th, but ran on Tuesday the 8th. All together, Loeb and Flynn churned out the hard-hitting story in eight days.
Another story that took about a week came from Brant Houston at The Hartford (Conn.) Courant. A breaking story on a possible serial murderer had been unfolding over the course of a couple weeks. Houston built his own database in XDB, using clips on unsolved murders. He included dates, descriptions of the female victims, time and place the body was found, demographic information and race. This took a few hours.
Next, Houston went to the medical examiner's office and made a separate database, to which he added significantly more information. After a couple of days, he had a clean printout with a couple of hundred records.
After two to three days of interviewing and updating information, the first story came out. Houston had established a possible pattern and enough connections that the state created an investigative task force. Additional stories were published and Houston's stories acted as a "tipster" for law enforcement officials.
"Once you have a database in-house, you seldom use it just once," Houston said.
Bob Wodnik of The Everett (Wash.) Herald agreed. His XDB database on building permit records had been used for numerous stories. Wodnik, Scott North and Jim Muhls did a story in three days on increased development which led to more stormwater runoff into an already flood-prone area.
With this story, there was no problem of building, finding or copying a database. It was there, and the reporters had become used to it, which made the quick story even easier.
George Landau, at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said his paper had done quick stories with in-house databases, too. Three examples came from computerized Missouri death certificates:
Deaths from breast cancer were occurring at a higher rate (in certain age ranges) in the city of St. Louis than in the county or in the state as a whole. No decline was shown in the number of drowning deaths among children for the last 12 years in the St. Louis area or the state as a whole. The rate of asthma deaths increased in Missouri over the last 12 years.
Stith said it's a realistic goal for the News & Observer to run a computer-assisted story every week.
"You could sit there in one database and do ten stories," he said. But, he added, the objective is to find one good story and get it in the paper.