We don't have a CAR post at the Traverse City Record-Eagle. It would be a luxury we couldn't afford. We have 11 reporters to cover our 13 mostly rural counties in northwestern Lower Michigan. We have a daily circulation of about 26,000 and a Sunday circulation of 40,000. I am the regional editor and oversee our project reporting as well as our theme beats: business, environment/health, family/education.
Our newspaper recomputerized a year ago, so we are set up beautifully for CAR. We are now completely PC-based in our newsroom with e-mail on all computers. We have Internet access on five of the PC-120 terminals in the newsroom. None of these computers are loaded with spreadsheet or database management software, except for the elementary spreadsheet functions available in Microsoft Word. We do have Excel and Access loaded on computers elsewhere in the building (business department and in the office of our weekly newspaper), so we can take disks to those machines and work with them.
The challenge now is to learn how to maximize the use of our computer system. I've picked it up because CAR has so many applications for a small newspaper with a small staff and large coverage area. I'm trying to do three things: get myself up to speed so that I can work efficiently with databases; determine for management what our newsroom needs so that we can gather and analyze data more conveniently; build a front-end system for our databases so that our reporters can easily access the information without having to know the ins and outs of Access and Excel.
Most of our CAR work so far has been quite elementary, designed to teach me how to efficiently use Access and Excel so that I can know it well enough to share it with the reporters. I have both Access and Excel on my computer at home, where I've done a lot of the work. It's meant an incredible amount of my own time, but I don't mind too much because I'm teaching myself. Here are some of the things we have done: Congressional campaign finance.
Our biggest CAR project this year has been the campaign finance records for our three congressional districts and six state legislative districts for the 1994-96 election cycle. Last fall, I used the American University site to download congressional data and spent many a weekend cleaning the data and checking business directories and websites so that I could correctly categorize them using codes listed in Larry Makinson's book, 'Follow the Money,' published by the Center for Responsive Politics, which has an excellent web site.
This enabled me later to do sorts to find out how various special interest groups - health, oil and gas, etc. - gave to our congressional leaders. I did the number crunching and gave them, as well as the assignment, to the reporter who had two days to report and write his story. Our stories were quite basic because we didn't have enough time to analyze the data and question some of the donations. State campaign finance.
Getting the data for the state representatives was more involved because Michigan's election data are not online. It all had to be typed and categorized. We used information found at the FEC Info page (www.tray.com), looking up all of the over $200 contributors by ZIP code and sifting through the information for anyone who gave more than $5,000. This provided not only an interesting story, but the beginning of a better understanding of the politics and business of our coverage area.
We also have downloaded state health statistics, school proficiency scores and EPA Toxic Release Inventory figures for in-depth reports. I also have all of the 13-county demographic information on disk in Excel files, plus area tax base statistics obtained from county equalization offices and area construction permits obtained from county building departments. My long-term goal for all this information is to build a front-end system and get it networked into our newsroom computers so that our reporters can easily use it without having to understand all the ins and outs of Access and Excel.
I am in the process of learning how to do that now, using Baltimore Sun's electronic news editor Mike Himowitz's front-end tutorial, which I downloaded from his site (http://www.clark.net/pub/ mikeh/mike/car.htm). In order to do this, I've needed to learn more of the intricacies of Access, so I am currently going through the Que Access 95 Tutor book and CD.