At a computer-assisted reporting conference several years ago, Stephen Miller, a technology expert at The New York Times, said he took an under-the-radar approach to CAR training in his newsroom. Talking to reporters, he found out what tasks they were doing by hand - like calculating how a government budget had changed from one year to the next. Then Miller let slip that it would be easier and faster to do such computations with a spreadsheet, and would the reporter like to know how?
Miller called this approach "stealth CAR," and I have found it's a good model for classrooms as well as newsrooms.
At VCU
Virginia Commonwealth University doesn't offer stand-alone CAR courses. Instead, faculty members integrate CAR into existing newswriting and reporting courses. That approach has certain advantages: It signals to students that CAR should be part of everyday journalism - not an esoteric specialty. Here are some tips on doing "stealth CAR" in J-schools:
Begin with paper. Before crunching census data with Excel, for example, give students a sheet of paper with a few columns of population numbers, and have them compute the percentage change by hand or with a calculator. This will help students understand and visualize what they want the computer to do.
Keep it simple. Don't start with an outer join involving three tables and a nested query. Start with sorting data in a spreadsheet and doing simple calculations. It may be better to teach a kludge in a familiar program than to teach an elegant solution with more complicated software.
Keep it real. Use real data - crime, traffic deaths and other stats - available online from government agencies. Taking advantage of student-power, obtain paper records (like health inspection reports for restaurants around campus), and have your class input them into a computer.
Relate CAR to other reporting skills. Describe CAR as another way of interviewing - but interviewing data instead of people. Your goal is to find bottom-line trends and then examples that illustrate the trends.
Preview, present, review, practice. Tell students what you are going to teach them; tell them what they are learning as you teach them; then tell them what you just taught them. Have students practice a particular skill, like the AutoSum button and other bottom-line functions, on a variety of datasets.
Emphasize people, not numbers. Reporters are in the business of telling stories, and data alone do not make a story. Discuss how to humanize the trends you discover with CAR. Then have students shut down their computers and go interview people.
Jeff South can be reached by e-mail at jcsouth@vcu.edu