Plugging in. The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.

The Morning Call newspaper has successfully used computer-assisted reporting to produce major investigative stories, including an exposé on a troubled local bank and analysis of mortgage lending discrimination, while working to build a library of local databases despite bureaucratic obstacles to public records access.

Computer-assisted reporting is still relatively new at The Morning Call, but since January the staff has generated two major stories that would have been impossible to do without the help of computers.

Last winter The Morning Call profiled a small local bank under state and federal investigation for dangerous and illegal lending practices. Since the 1980s, the bank had made one bad loan after another and was sitting on a mountain of foreclosed real estate.

Morning Call reporters built a flat-file database from 1,300 hard copy court records which allowed them to quickly identify who was doing business with the troubled bank.

The result was a four-part series on the bank that "couldn't have been done without the computer," said reporter Tim Darragh.

Another Morning Call story looked at mortgage lending in the Allentown area. The newspaper purchased the Federal Reserve's 1991 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data on nine-track tape. Reporters analyzed more than 20,000 mortgage applications from the Allentown area, and found that blacks seeking mortgage loans were rejected more than twice as often as whites, and significantly more than Hispanics, even when they reported similar income.

Apart from putting together those two projects, we've been negotiating for several local databases. We've also subscribed to more than three dozen on-line services and bulletin boards. Morning Call reporters now have access to databases on everything from federal bankruptcy courts to the Toxic Release Inventory.

One of our goals is to build a library of local databases and then set up front-end programs that will make it easy for all reporters to use the computer on daily stories. We still have a ways to go before our goal is realized, but Morning Call reporters and editors are confident that the newspaper is on the right track.

"There have been no hoops to jump through to get funding for the program," said city editor David Erdman. "Our executive editor Larry Hymans is very committed to computer-assisted reporting and new technology in general."

Since January, The Morning Call has purchased two 486 computers with tons of memory, a nine-track tape drive, a CD-ROM driver and several software packages, including Nine Track Express, XDB, Paradox and the MapInfo/PCensus package.

Local bureaucrats, however, are doing everything they can to keep us from putting our new equipment to good use. We have run into several roadblocks in pursuit of local databases. Examples include one county wanting $5,000 for its tax assessment file, and another requiring that we tell them exactly how we plan to use their voter registration database.

"Bureaucrats like to describe this issue as one in which the press is seeking special privileges," Erdman said. "All we're fighting for is basic access to public information."

Unfortunately, the law has not always been on our side. Pennsylvania access law, which is notoriously weak, defers to other state statutes. For example, the open records law says the state Department of Motor Vehicles database is public. However, we can't get DMV files because the state's vehicle code forbids the mass interrogation of vehicle and drivers' records.