You're sitting at your desk one afternoon, when the story hits the fan. You've only got a few hours, but you want to make the most of your computer skills. What do you do? Be realistic. Computer-assisted reporting can put you leagues ahead of your PC-challenged colleagues when it comes to responding to breaking stories, but only if you use it wisely. The last thing you want is to get caught up in technical problems and do a mediocre job on the story.
So what can you realistically accomplish with CAR on deadline? Numbers and background. Use the Net to flesh out that list of who to call for the story. There is no better way to quickly find a public relations person for a particular company than to visit the firm's Web site and read through past press releases. As a bonus, those releases may have information that's pertinent to your story now. Is the president resigning?
Chances are, you can find the last shareholder proxy that told how much he makes, or records of his insider stock trades, as part of the company's investor relations section. Get experts. A Lexis/Nexis search on your topic may turn up some great experts. So might a search of the Web, though be careful to double-check sites and attributions to make sure you're speaking with someone legitimate. ProfNet's Expert Database, posted at www.profnet.com, may have someone who can speak knowledgeably for you.
If you're a beat reporter, it might be worth compiling the names and e-mail addresses of experts you speak with often, then use them in a (rare) mass mailing if you're desperately searching for someone who can be quoted in your story. Two tips: First, tell those experts you occasionally do this, and ask them if it's okay to contact them. Second, use this resource as little as possible, and you won't burn out a good deadline source.
Crunch some quick numbers. Don't be afraid to fire up Excel or some other spreadsheet to help you if you need to crunch numbers, whether it is the number of beds in your local hospitals, changes in the stock prices for local public companies or budgets for different city departments. If you've got more than a dozen numbers to calculate, Excel will be faster even if you have to type in all the raw data yourself.
Analyze familiar databases. If you're reporting on a recall of listeria-tainted meat (as the Free Press did for much of last year) and you have a database of USDA recalls that you've already compiled and used before, it's a snap to pull it open to calculate grand total poundage of meat recalled for listeria or other problems. Because you've used the database before, you know where to find it, what it contains, how accurate it is and how it works.
Those are the tools you need to do a snap analysis on deadline – one that will make you look extremely smart when compared to your competition. Similar problems. Using a good Web search engine such as Google (www.google.com) or a good newsgroup search engine such as Deja (www.deja.com), you may be able to find someone who has suffered from whatever problem you're reporting on. The catch: It's darned hard to find local sources on deadline.
If you can get away with someone in another state, however, it's worth the attempt. What's NOT reasonable to expect from CAR on deadline? New databases. First, you may have troubles getting the data you need at all, if it's not posted already on the Web. Second, even if you have the data on the Web or on disk, if you've never used it before, you're bound to run into glitches. Even if the data doesn't cause you.
Get directions: Don't overlook the Net's ability to help you with the most basic of tasks — figuring out where you have to drive to report the story. MapQuest (at www.mapquest.com) is just one of dozens of mapping sites that can give you directions to that explosion.