Every successful computer-assisted reporting effort chronicled in Uplink, there probably is an unfinished story languishing in newsrooms around the country. Reporters using computers for the first time jump in with enthusiasm. Then reality sets in. They often find themselves struggling to tame the mountain of data they obtained on 9-track tape or (Ugh!) key-punched themselves. These once-energetic souls now stare blankly at their screens.
They are frustrated, puzzled and intent on avoiding eye-contact with editors. Two weeks later, there's still no story in the paper. Computer-assisted reporting often becomes the domain of a few reporters and editors who work on projects. That's unfortunate. Ideally, newspapers should be able to use computers to assist in investigations AND improve stories reporters write on a daily basis. Chris Feola outlined the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American's approach to democratizing the process in the March issue of Uplink.
Feola's bottom line: Our reporters can get their hands on data they need in seconds. And so they use it. We've had a similar experience at The Post-Standard in Syracuse. By concentrating on making data access as easy as possible, we've been able to make use of our databases for stories in nearly every day's paper. For the most part, this involves helping reporters on deadline locate sources, check facts and add detail.
A reporter scrambling to cover a late-night fatal fire, for example, can count on being able to quickly find a list of neighbors to call, identify the building's owner and its assessed value, and obtain a demographic profile of the neighborhood's housing values, rents and income levels from census data. The most popular databases we have acquired are telephone directories on CD-ROM. Hardly an hour goes by without a reporter or editor using one of these databases.
We use a NYNEX product which is updated monthly and a national directory called ProPhone, produced by ProCD Inc. The latest version of ProPhone allows searching by address, providing instant access to a national crisscross directory. It's an inexpensive gem. Because the telephone book is such a familiar tool to reporters, the transition to the electronic directory is painless for most. From there, it's a small step to use other databases.
Other heavily in-house databases include voter registration city and county assessment rolls, government rolls, campaign contribution records for federal, state and local candidates and 1990 census data. All of the databases, with the exception of those on CD-ROM, are accessed using programs written in Paradox's application language, or PAL. All of the directory changes, query structures, report parameters and other necessities usually required to tap database resources are invisible to users.
All a reporter has to do is keep making choices from menus, then type in the name, address or value he or she is searching for. Writing these customized programs isn't as complicated as it might sound. All of the applications at The Post-Standard were produced by reporters and editors with no prior programming experience. The databases enhance our newspaper every day. The surprise is that this approach may have helped us produce better investigative projects.
If we had set out to devote all our resources to long-term computer-assisted stories, we would have drawn on the talents of only a few reporters and editors. By having the entire staff familiar with our databases, we benefit from the story ideas they generate when they use the system. When a reporter gets an idea, he or she learns how to use interactive Paradox to do the analysis. Since the reporter already is familiar with the data, the learning curve is not as steep.
Consequently, we have a long and growing list of computer-assisted stories that we have been able to turn around fairly efficiently. Examples include: Detailing faults in prison health care by tracking the treatment of more than 1,100 inmates who had died in the state's care in the past decade; Analyzing salary differences between men and women in county government; Dissecting a public agency's telephone records to help show that its top executive was doing his job from California; Uncovering an obscure tax exemption the city was granting developers by designating new parking garages as bomb shelters.
Writing a feature on people with leap year birthdays. Not every computer story has to be an investigative project. This staple of Feb. 29 editions everywhere was painless because the voter registration roll provided the reporter with a list of names of people born on leap day, complete with phone numbers. All of those stories involved different reporters, and several other members of the staff are being drawn by increments into computer-assisted, long-term stories.
We've had our share of glitches and failures. But so far every reporter who has been involved with a computer-assisted story has survived. A few are even brazen enough to look their editors in the eye.