{
  "id": "1999-may-cars-advantages",
  "slug": "1999-may-cars-advantages",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-may-cars-advantages.html",
  "year": 1999,
  "month": "May",
  "monthNum": 5,
  "headline": "CAR's advantages",
  "kicker": "TIME, SWEAT AND SHOE LEATHER",
  "author_name": "Paul Overberg",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "USA Today",
  "summary": "Paul Overberg explores how computer-assisted reporting provides efficiency by directing journalists toward specific data-driven leads for more effective shoe-leather reporting.",
  "keywords": [
    "efficiency",
    "journalism",
    "data analysis"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Technology",
    "Journalism & Newsroom"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Nexis",
    "MapInfo"
  ],
  "full_text": "One of computer-assisted reporting's less-celebrated virtues is its ability to save time, sweat and shoe leather.\n\nWhen we sell CAR to skeptical editors and reporters, we often focus on how it can root out corruption or do the previously impossible, such as analyzing and publishing to the Web a school test-score package.\n\nBut it's good to remember CAR's humbler virtues. Time and money are always short. Saving you two days of interviewing and saving the editor's plan to run your story the following weekend win just as many converts as a big hit.\n\nThis idea struck me again last year when discussion arose on the NICAR mailing list about how one might track and analyze the tragedy of fatally abused children who have been written off as victims of sudden-infant death syndrome. I watched colleagues at Gannett News Service do this in 1991. Most cases turned up from interviews and Lexis-Nexis searches. But they also had a statistician analyze 49,569 death certificates from 1987 of children under nine to determine autopsy rates for various causes of death, especially suspicious ones, in every state. That steered them to good places for shoe-leather work, which turned up great material for the case database. Reporters Marjie Lundstrom and Rochelle Sharpe won the Pulitzer.\n\nMore recent examples:\n\n• In analyzing county-level personal bankruptcy rates in 1997, USA Today's Barbara Pearson checked several correlations before finding that one of the best was whether a state allowed wage garnishment. She mapped the data and found the Augusta, Ga., metropolitan area offered a stark contrast. Flanking the Savannah River, Richmond County, Ga., and Aiken County, S.C., were pretty similar, but the former had twice the bankruptcy rate. Reporter Tanya Albert went to Richmond County and found a wealth of local lore – the perfect prism for this CAR story.\n\n• Water well tests around Oakland County, Mich., last year showed fairly high levels of arsenic. The Detroit Free-Press mapped test results with geological information. The worst results clustered where soil was shallow over sandstone from which the arsenic came, said Heather Newman, a Free-Press projects reporter and CAR specialist. That told reporters exactly where to find people who were most affected.\n\n• In Utica, N.Y., gasoline prices well above the national and regional averages prompted an editor at The Observer-Dispatch to wonder if they were due to concentrated gas station",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-may-cars-advantages.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-may-cars-advantages.json"
}