When student journalists Katie Crecente and Summer Parrish got a tip last year that prices for the same drug prescriptions varied widely among pharmacies in their community, they thought they might have a story. An analysis of an Excel spreadsheet confirmed their hunch.
The University of South Carolina students asked the pharmacies for prices on four types of drugs and built their spreadsheet in a computer-assisted reporting class. Crecente reported the story on the local cable TV system and won first place in the student competition for the Southern Regional Emmy Awards.
Crecente and Parrish are not alone. Students in dozens of U.S. journalism and mass communication programs are learning to analyze information in spreadsheets and database managers, and to find the story behind the numbers.
Many of the schools now teaching CAR based their approach on the program at the Missouri School of Journalism, in Columbia, Mo., which just completed its 10th year. The program has also led the way by training dozens of professors at boot camps offered by NICAR, a joint venture between the school and Investigative Reporters and Editors.
The issue many journalism educators say they are now wrestling with is not whether to teach CAR skills, but how and to what degree. Increasingly, they are trying to decide whether to teach the skills in a stand-alone class, weave them into other reporting and writing classes, or do both.
According to an informal e-mail survey of 100 accredited journalism and mass communication programs for this story, educators appear to be evenly split in their approaches to teaching CAR. One half of the 64 respondents said they offered a stand-alone CAR class, although some do not offer the class every semester.
Of the 32 programs that don't teach a stand-alone CAR class, 25 said the skills are taught in other courses. And most of the schools that offer a freestanding class say they also try to integrate the skills throughout the curriculum.
Steve Doig, the Knight Chair at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunication, said the goal of trying to teach all journalism students basic CAR skills is difficult to achieve, particularly in large schools like his. "I have 15 students each semester in my (CAR) class, 30 in a year," he said. "There are 1,400 students in the Cronkite school. I can't teach them all."
Doig said the school is tinkering with ways to circulate CAR throughout the curriculum. His current tactics include introducing students to online resources in his basic news writing class and presenting guest lectures on CAR in his colleagues' classes.
The classes
The names that are given to stand-alone CAR classes vary, including precision journalism or computer-assisted reporting. Some schools spend a lot of time teaching online research skills, while others concentrate on spreadsheets and database managers.
At the Missouri School of Journalism, CAR is taught in a stand-alone class and incorporated into an investigative reporting class taught by Brant Houston, executive director of IRE and NICAR.
"Part of our mission here is to make sure this tool is blended into good reporting," said Houston, author of the textbook, "Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide."
One of his students, Mark Greenblatt, used National Bridge Inventory data to report on failing bridges in Missouri.
For the stand-alone class, Jo Craven trains students to use Microsoft Excel and Access and to negotiate for data from government agencies. In addition to weekly lessons, students work on two semester-long projects.
Craven wants students to take away from her class the ability to logically go about their reporting, whether the story involves a dataset or not. "I want them to learn to respond to those bells in their head that say, 'Something here is not right.' The worst thing they can do as reporters is have a funny feeling and not follow up on it," she said.
One of her students, Charles Choi, recently built a spreadsheet of data on check fraud in Columbia and wrote a front-page story for the Columbia Missourian. Choi said journalism schools with stand-alone CAR classes are giving aspiring journalists more reasons to get a degree in journalism, as opposed to a liberal arts degree.
"This makes journalism school more important," he said. "Not everybody needs a V-8 engine, but it's really nice."
Factors
A lot of factors affect a school's approach to teaching CAR, including faculty members' philosophical views about the subject, whether adequate resources are available, and whether faculty members are qualified to teach CAR.
The bulk of the accredited programs offering a stand-alone CAR class teach it as an elective, because under the accreditation rules, students must take about three-fourths of their classes outside their major, and the schools can offer only so many core journalism classes.
Accreditation has influenced the decision of the journalism department at Washington and Lee University not to offer a freestanding CAR class, said Ham Smith, department head.
"In the highly restricted accredited curriculum, it does not seem wise to require a CAR course," he said.
Meanwhile, he argued, teaching CAR as an elective is problematic.
"Isolating CAR in a non-required course unfairly limits the number of students knowledgeable" in CAR, he said, "so we dribble it out everywhere as a standard reporting activity."
Philip Meyer, a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a pioneer in using computers to enhance reporting, feels strongly that his school should not offer a stand-alone CAR class. At UNC, the skills are taught in other classes.
"Teaching CAR as a separate class perpetuates the illusion that computer competence is an isolated and esoteric specialty accessible only to a few," Meyer said.
Virginia Commonwealth University also has subscribed to the theory that CAR should not be taught as a separate class, said Jeff South, an associate professor in the School of Mass Communications.
But what South and some other educators say they have discovered is that when you don't teach a specialized class in CAR and depend on faculty members to integrate the skills in other courses, the job doesn't always get done.
"When everyone is responsible for CAR, it can turn out that no one is responsible for CAR," South said. At VCU, he said, "some faculty members did not have adequate CAR training and did not feel comfortable teaching CAR."
Now, the school is looking into requiring a course in information gathering, which would introduce students to online resources and perhaps to spreadsheets and database managers.
With time, say many educators, stand-alone classes will be phased out as CAR becomes a more routine reporting tool. Schools may teach advanced classes in CAR, but more and more students won't blink when handed data in a spreadsheet.
"Hopefully the concept of using a spreadsheet and going online will become so ingrained that treating it as a separate weird specialty will no longer be important," Doig said.