How do you talk the bosses into starting and building a CAR program? This topic has become a staple at IRE/NICAR conferences and newsroom presentations.
We've developed strategies for reporters to deal with the inevitable questions from the bean counters about cost and we've coined lines for reporters to feed to skeptical editors about CAR being the future of journalism. But at the Silicon Valley conference, we did something really radical. We invited in top editors to see for themselves.
It took two members of the local planning committee in California, Jonathan Krim, assistant managing editor at the San Jose Mercury News and Tom Honig, executive editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, to come up with a notion that ought to have been as plain as an "Abort, Fail, Retry" message. We need to talk with the men and women who make decisions and set policies in newsrooms. Publishers, executive editors and managing editors are the people to convert. As reporters, we've wasted too much time whining among ourselves about their frugality and lack of vision.
The editor's program
The half-day editors program, even with a demonstration of Mercury Center, an open pass to the panels and hands-on training at the Westin and a FREELUNCH, was not entirely a smash. Top editors from many California papers, including some of the biggest, didn't come or canceled at the last minute pleading press of business and meetings. Still, that is only a symptom of the problem and it was a great start.
The editors who did come got a hard sell, starting with a welcome from Mercury News publisher Jay Harris, who saw the light about investigative reporting and computer-assisted reporting before a lot of the rest of us. A slide version of IRE/NICAR's traditional 60-Ideas-in-60-Minutes offered proof of what CAR already has done, suggested story ideas and a sense that CAR is important right now and not some prediction for a distant future.
Speakers help with the message
Lisa P. Van Asch, news research and training coordinator for the Raleigh News & Observer, told the editors that computers are as vital a journalistic tool now as telephones, not some luxury to be bestowed by management on the privileged. She told them CAR can level the playing field in the newspaper industry, supplying smaller papers with the resources to take on much bigger competitors.
She also advised them to "arm everyone who can shoot," as CAR extraordinare Pat Stith has described the Raleigh program. Train anyone who shows an interest in CAR. That's the best way to safeguard a program against the loss of a star nerd. It also ensures that good stories will wind up in all sections.
Virginia Fielder, vice president for research for Knight-Ridder's newspaper division, issued another wake-up call. Check out your readers, she told the editors. Count how many have car phones. TVs. Cable. PCs. The technology that will change how most people communicate and get their news already has taken root and begun growing.
The overriding theme of the editors' program, like that of CAR Trek overall, was that it's time to get over the fear of computing and start doing it.