When I first heard about computer-assisted reporting, I thought a super smart computer had finally been invented to either write stories or - at the very least - make the phone calls and do all the reporting needed for a story.
Jokes aside, computer-assisted reporting may well be the best thing to happen to journalism since objectivity became the non-negotiable standard in the profession.
The reason: CAR helps all journalists write the type of stories that have never been written before- stories with the precision of scholarly studies.
The power of the computer to order and group figures and information on the screen in ways not possible on paper enable reporters to discover hidden information that was available before only to a limited number of government officials or business managers.
With CAR, journalists can go from merely covering to discovering information.
Allow me to tell you how I've been able to put my newly-acquired skills in CAR to use. Keep in mind that I'm no expert by any means. I only went to my first computer-assisted class - aptly called boot camp August at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Mo.
On the beat
It was actually during the IRE and NICAR boot camp that I realized, on the very first day, that I could use these CAR skills on my beat.
I cover transportation in Miami-Dade County - and one of the biggest parts of my job is to monitor and write about traffic congestion on the highways.
So, when Brant Houston, the IRE and NICAR executive director, described the properties of Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program, I knew instantly that I could apply the software to traffic figures.
That's because one way of measuring whether a road is congested is to determine how many vehicles it's carrying and the only way to determine that is to count the number of vehicles that pass at any given time at a pre-determined spot on the road.
The state Department of Transportation publishes the results of their counts in thick documents listing the average daily traffic volume on all state roads.
But those reports are difficult to understand or analyze. However, once I understood how to use Excel, I knew I could apply the software to the traffic volume reports and develop stories with unusual angles.
So as I participated in the NICAR boot camp in August, I began to develop my first Excel database of average daily traffic figures for major expressways in Miami-Dade County.
With CAR, journalists can go from merely covering to discovering information.
I had to enter by hand into a new Excel file the DOT traffic numbers because they were not available in electronic form.
To make it simple, I entered data only for the major expressways like Interstates 95 and 75, among others. So every day, after boot camp finished, I would come back to my bed and breakfast hotel room and enter traffic figures for each of the 10 or so expressways I picked at random to determine whether traffic had gone up or declined in the county. I had sets of figures for 1997 and 1998.
A better view
By the end of the week of boot camp a clearer picture emerged. Something I had never realized before. Traffic was up - way up - not only on all major expressways in the county but particularly on those that link Dade to neighboring Broward County.
On one roadway, I-75, traffic was up a whopping 99 percent from about 60,000 to almost 120,000 annual daily vehicles near the Broward-Dade line.
This statistic, though it was in the 1998 DOT traffic volume report, was not immediately apparent to me until I used Excel to compare the figure with the 1997 report.
That way I was able not only to see the difference between one year and the next but also actually calculate the difference.
The software gave me the ability to add, subtract, average and do percentages that before would have been difficult since I'm not a math wizard by any means. Often I still resort to my trusty fingers to do or confirm an operation.
At any rate, learning Excel and how to apply it to DOT numbers led to the production of three stories for The Miami Herald within the first couple months after boot camp.
The first was a simple one that told readers how traffic volume had gone up on major expressways in the county from 1997 to 1998, just to show off my new skills.
The second story was much more complex. By calculating traffic volumes, I was able to discern that the heaviest traffic increases were on roads linking Miami-Dade County with neighboring Broward County.
The significant discovery here is the explanation why traffic had increased on these cross-county roads: that a large percentage of people who once lived in Miami-Dade County had moved to new homes across the county line in Broward but kept their jobs in Dade.
The "reverse commute" began after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Dade in 1992 and has accelerated in the last two or three years.
While I think I've become pretty adept at manipulating information in Excel, dealing with serious database programs like Access is still a challenge.
It may be a different story down the road, so to speak.
Alfonso Chardy can be reached by e-mail at Achardy@herald.com