Computer-assisted reporting at the St Louis Post-Dispatch has gone from a highly specialized skill to just part of the job. We were among the first papers in the country to dedicate a full-time reporter to computer-related projects. Now, we are working to mainstream CAR into the newsroom, and are encouraging beat and specialty reporters to incorporate the power of personal computers onto their beats.
Management - from the managing editor to assistant city editors is pushing reporters and editors to embrace the gospel of spreadsheets and databases. 'I want to get computers out of the temple and into the professional kit of everyone in our newsroom,' says Managing Editor Foster Davis. 'The computer does ordinary tasks so rapidly it seems like a genius instead of a stupid workaholic. The more that people understand what tasks the computer can do, the more they are freed to do the work that a computer cannot do.
What drives me nuts is seeing bright people tied up doing stuff a computer could do for them, if we equipped them and trained them.' The Post-Dispatch also has specialized hardware, such as a nine-track drive and a 1-gig magneto-optical drive. This spring, we will buy a large NT server (with 16 GB of storage space) to provide true client-server database services. Spending money and time training people.
We have sent nine staff members so far to the NICAR boot camp. In February 1995, we are scheduled to begin an in-house computer-assisted training program that will cover everything from data acquisition to index tags. Getting everyone on the Internet. The publisher has approved an Internet node for high-speed access from all office PCs. In addition, we have contracted to provide full Internet access from home for any reporter or editor who wants it.
Several reporters and editors already have e-mail addresses, but we want to make knowledge of the Internet part of every reporter's job. We also are maintaining our commitment to bigger computer-assisted projects. Our practice has been to pair a beat reporter or reporters with the CAR specialist, which has allowed us to draw on the expertise of both sides, to get stories into the paper faster and to show more reporters the power of the PC.
Tim Novak and I analyzed 130,000 Illinois pension records to show that legislators had written state pension law to favor themselves and state judges. Joan Little and I found that black students overwhelmingly make up the waiting list to get into magnet schools, considered among the best in St. Louis. Carolyn Tuft, Joe Holleman and I (all NICAR bootcamp grads) matched records of people licensed to drive ambulances in Missouri with the database of moving violations.
We found that the state was not doing background checks on applicants, and that people with poor driving records and multiple drunken-driving convictions were licensed to drive ambulances. Our story led to other stories about the state granting ambulance licenses to people who had stolen drugs and money from ambulance districts. The stories prompted the state to remove the head of ambulance licensing and to change the policy for granting licenses.
Post-Dispatch beat reporters are beginning to do their own data analysis for investigative and enterprise stories - in addition to the work done by the two people who work full time on computer-related projects. Washington correspondent Kathy Best (a NICAR bootcamp grad) used Microsoft FoxPro to track spending in a U.S. Senate election in Missouri to find out what areas of the state and country were giving the most.
Business reporter Jerri Stroud used Excel and Atlas GIS to analyze and map farmers' participation in the federal Conservation Reserve Program. Here's how we are involving our newsroom more deeply in computer-assisted efforts: Giving people the hardware and software they need. We have about 80 486 PCs in our newsroom and bureaus. We hope early this year to hit our goal of providing a PC to every reporter who wants one.
The machines have enough disk space, memory and horsepower to allow a beat reporter to analyze just about any chunk of data. We equip our machines with Excel, FoxPro and Microsoft Access. We have several reporters proficient in FoxPro, but we are starting to make the transition to Access as our primary database manager. We also have other software, such as Atlas GIS and SPSS.