{ "id": "1996-october-car-helps-catch-big-fish-story", "slug": "1996-october-car-helps-catch-big-fish-story", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1996-october-car-helps-catch-big-fish-story.html", "year": 1996, "month": "October", "monthNum": 10, "headline": "CAR helps catch big fish story", "kicker": "Trawling the 'Net", "author_name": "Dan Kim", "author_title": "NICAR staff", "affiliation": "NICAR", "summary": "In 1994, Times-Picayune reporters Mark Schleifstein, John McQuaid, and Bob Marshall investigated troubled Gulf of Mexico fisheries using computer-assisted reporting and internet research, uncovering a global story about overfishing, wetland destruction, and economic impacts on fishing communities worldwide.", "keywords": [ "fishing", "investigation", "technology" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Health & Environment", "Data & Databases" ], "technologies": [ "World Wide Web", "Internet", "Excel" ], "full_text": "In 1994, Mark Schleifstein of The Times-Picayune asked a simple question: \"Is the Gulf of Mexico fishing industry in trouble?\" Then, Schleifstein and reporting partners John McQuaid and Bob Marshall used CAR and the 'Net to catch a big fish. Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council staff members told Schleifstein there would be plenty of fish - more than enough for both sport fishermen and commercial fishing - for the next 20 years. Staffers also said they had learned a lesson from the near-demise of the commercially valuable redfish, which was nearly wiped out in the 1980s by over-fishing, caused in part by the rise in popularity of Cajun blackened redfish. Yet, when Schleifstein asked the council how the continued rapid loss of wetlands along the Louisiana coast would affect the Gulf fishery, the council replied that if the wetlands continued to disappear at their present rate of destruction, most commercially-important species of fish would disappear, too. That's when Schleifstein realized there was a bigger story.\n\nWorld scope\n\nSchleifstein, McQuaid and Marshall soon found their investigation of fishing issues had expanded into a world-wide story explaining the commercial, environmental and social forces affecting the world's fishing industry. They examined the giant Japanese fish markets, which have driven much of the growth in the Gulf's fishing industry and endangered many Gulf fish species. They looked at environmental damage in Ecuador and Thailand resulting from aquaculture. They probed how overfishing has affected communities in Massachusetts, Maryland and Alaska. And they examined how the destruction of wetlands affects fishing and fishers in Louisiana and abroad.\n\nThe 15-month investigation resulted in \"Oceans of Trouble: Are the world's fisheries doomed?\" - an eight-part series published in March.\n\nTrawling the 'Net\n\nMuch of Schleifstein's computer work involved using the World Wide Web and Internet e-mail. He netted four listservs that were key to finding contacts among scientists and the fishing industry and to becoming quickly acquainted with the issues. He searched Web sites to find scientific papers on fisheries issues, as well as more fisheries contacts.\n\nWhile Schleifstein trawled the listservs, McQuaid handled most of the database work. The data, supplied by the National Marine Fisheries Service, included historical catches and market quantities of species for various regions and times. Some of the older data was provided on paper and had to be entered by hand. McQuaid entered and analyzed the data with Excel, generating summary data on fish catches by species and region.\n\nMost agencies he went to had little data on the economic impact of changes in the fishing industry or the quality of the fisheries, but economic problems caused by over-fishing became a primary focus for the series. To get at this issue, McQuaid ran market-value analyses for the fisheries catch data, using Consumer Price indices to normalize prices. McQuaid reporters to look for the agenda of the agency supplying data they use.\n\nProblems\n\nMcQuaid said the real difficulty in doing this story was the lack of statistics and data concerning the economic effects and trends in the fishing industry. Often, the number of people employed by the fishing industry was not well documented, nor was the actual economic impact of increased fish catch amounts and changing fish prices. McQuaid also emphasized that the lack of data was as important to the story as the data he was able to get: The lack of data, he said, limited the ability of agencies whose job is to protect the environment and the fisheries to effectively do that job. Most of the data he was able to get was only collected for species of fish that were already seriously threatened by over-fishing.\n\nThe agencies seemed to do little to gather data on existing fish stocks before problems arose.\n\nResults\n\nSchleifstein said he hopes the series may have helped shape the revisions to the Magnusson Act recently approved by Congress. The act is the major federal regulatory system governing commercial fishing. Items focused on in the series that are included in the revision are:\n\nIndividual transferable quotas, a way of assigning fish species-specific property rights to individual fishers aimed at protecting the resource while limiting the economic impact on fishers; and requirements that fish nets include devices to allow the escape of endangered sea turtles and fish bycatch - unwanted or too-small fish that often are thrown away when caught in existing nets.\n\nSchleifstein mentioned that the series' discussion of the link between the annual summer \"dead zone,\" or area of very low oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico, and the use of agricultural fertilizers in the Midwest, has been used by policymakers working with Midwest farmers to reduce their use of fertilizers.\n\nThe importance of wetlands, as the story points out, has led the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council to look at protecting the wetlands from further deterioration.\n\nYou can reach Mark Schleifstein at (504) 826-3327, or send e-mail to mersmia@aol.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1997-may-car-catches-big-fish", "score": 0.216 }, { "slug": "1997-may-hook-line-and-pulitzer", "score": 0.199 }, { "slug": "2005-novemberdecember-covering-the-big-story", "score": 0.133 }, { "slug": "1996-july-fishing-in-international-waters-reeling-in-web-data", "score": 0.13 }, { "slug": "1998-july-chasing-the-big-story", "score": 0.108 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1996-october-car-helps-catch-big-fish-story.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1996-october-car-helps-catch-big-fish-story.json" }