Think of computers as fact finders

I've never understood a computer manual. I don't know how RSS works and I can't tell you what USB stands for. I'm not a computer geek. Never will be. But here's one thing I really can't understand: Journalists who won't learn how to use computers to do their jobs better.

I wrote recently that I objected to the term computer-assisted reporting, because we've let a specialty develop around a skill that every reporter should develop. I think the term is as absurd as notebook-assisted reporting or telephone-assisted reporting. Like the computer, those are tools every reporter should be competent to use.

Let me be clear that I'm not a specialist in this specialty. I've forgotten more than I've retained as I've stumbled to learn data analysis skills. But I've kept stumbling and trying. I learned first-hand how effective computers could be as a reporting tool, and how even a computer klutz could use them, 10 years ago before I'd even had any CAR training (I hate reducing that term to an acronym, but it is a long phrase to work into a story).

I was going to a National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting program the next month. I was covering the environment beat temporarily, filling in between a reporter who had retired and the selection of the next environment reporter.

The state had shut down the program for cleaning up leaking underground storage tanks (LUST, a great acronym to get into a story) because it had run out of money. The state was saying they expected the shutdown to last a couple of months. People in the cleanup business were saying they thought the cleanups would be stopped for several months. I went to the Department of Environmental Quality and went through all of their bills on hand, entering the data by hand.

I already had Excel on my computer at home. I stumbled through the tutorial to learn enough Excel that I was able to show that just the bills on hand (and lots more were in the pipeline) would take as much money as the state had received in the fund in the past seven months. I couldn't get this information by old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. I couldn't work my sources at the DEQ (even if I had sources there) to get someone to leak that information to me. They hadn't done the math. They didn't know until I showed them.

I could have done it by hand, but not as quickly (I did this in a day, and that included my stumbling around with the tutorial). I was so lacking in confidence that I didn't go to the state and say "gotcha." I went to the state with my data and said, "here's how it looks to me. Am I doing something wrong?" I wasn't. They looked my data over and confirmed my story. It ran on page one. As I recall, the shutdown actually lasted nine or 10 months. I figured out this was a pretty important tool and I'd better learn how to use it or I'd be left behind.

Well, I learned a lot about computer-assisted reporting from colleagues who knew a lot more than I did, primarily Carol Napolitano (now Carol Andrews), Paul Goodsell and Joe Kolman. But frankly, I deferred to them more than I should have. I should have kept stumbling with the software and mastered more computer skills than I have. I am simultaneously chagrined that I haven't learned more data analysis skills and outraged that I know more than most reporters.

That column that I wrote recently sparked an inquiry from a reader, which in turn sparked an e-mail discussion among newsroom trainers. The reader was trying to interest colleagues in training in use of spreadsheets and the response she got was "I don't need to know that."

I already wrote about what that discussion had to say about attracting staff members to training they don't think they need. Now I pass along my colleagues' thoughts on what reporters (and editors) ought to know about using computers.

This comes from Bill Dedman, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose Power Reporting web site is one of the most useful sites for journalists, noted that we need to stress that computer skills are essential for daily journalism, not just investigative projects:

"Let's say all beat reporters and their editors are required to be able to handle an e-mail with a spreadsheet attached. Let's say it's a list of unpaid property taxes. Each journalist must know how to save the spreadsheet to the hard drive, find it again, open it, and sort it from largest unpaid tax to smallest, and forward that sorted list on to another reporter/editor/artist.

"That's a more practical, low-to-the-ground, everyday example of why journalists need spreadsheet training. 'Cause they get them in the mail.

"I do agree that training should be mandatory. If The New York Times has mandatory training, who are the rest of us to think we don't need it?

"But not training that's expressed in terms of investigative projects. We do not need to have everyone in the newspaper prepared to do computer-assisted projects, and the reporters and editors know that. We do need everyone to be able to do computer-assisted paragraphs, and to react quickly on deadline.

"We can't afford to have anybody working the night desk or covering any story for the newspaper who hasn't demonstrated the ability to:

• Have a Guidestar account and know how to look up a Form 990 for a nonprofit organization, and to be able to recognize when that's not the latest one and we need to exercise our rights to contact the organization directly for a fresh copy.


• Find and read a company's annual report online, to prepare for an interview.


• Look up the Census facts on a neighborhood using Factfinder at the Census Bureau, to craft a sentence about a place and its people, and how they vary from the rest of the city/county/state."

Derek Willis, research database editor for The Washington Post, sent this response:

"It's dismaying to hear of journalists who say of basic spreadsheet training, 'I don't need to know that.' Yes, they do, for the very simple reason that many of the people and institutions that journalists cover are using tools like Excel every day. Governments produce and distribute information in Excel or formats designed for Excel. Baseball teams do statistical analysis. Businesses, well, Excel was built for business use.

"When I worked at Congressional Quarterly covering politics I once asked a political consultant why election coverage was lacking in insight and why results often confounded the 'experts' in the press. He told me that elections were now decided on the basis of who had the best information, who could spot the trends and patterns that could lead to success. He likened it to an arms race. The press, he said, was still in the stone age of that race. He laughed about it.

"Functionally and technically, many newsrooms have not kept up with the people and institutions we cover on a daily basis. This gap will only increase – and weaken our products –should journalists continue to insist that they don't need to know how to use increasingly common tools.

"And yes, I get the same response here."

Any reporter (however good he or she is) who says "I don't need to know that" is missing out on stories and on information for stories. That reporter is at the mercy of officials to analyze data their own way and tell the reporter what it means.

I couldn't get a state official to leak me the truth about the LUST fund because state officials hadn't run the numbers themselves yet. They eyeballed them kind of optimistically and guessed they'd be out of business a couple months. Maybe I could have gotten an official to tell me (not for attribution) that the official guess was a little optimistic. But then I just have dueling opinions, one of them nameless. Isn't it better to have the facts?

Here's a more recent example:

I was working with some other Omaha World-Herald reporters on a project exposing some horrible failures of the Nebraska child welfare system. (An aside here: Kudos to those World-Herald colleagues, Karyn Spencer, Jeremy Olson and Mike Reilly, who won a Casey Medal for part of that project.)

State officials acknowledged that Nebraska's system had failed a federal audit, but they said (accurately) that all states had failed. So I got the federal audits for all states that had been completed and was able to report that Nebraska had the second-worst child welfare system of all those audited so far. I couldn't have done the story (certainly not as quickly as I did; and probably wouldn't have undertaken it) without computer skills.

As with the LUST story, I couldn't have done the story by working sources well because no one else had done the work.

Any reporter on any beat does "need to know that." Yes, you can report many matters well without analyzing data. But if you can't use the computer when the child welfare officials tell you their program isn't any more screwed up than anyone else's or the environmental officials tell you that they'll be cleaning up leaking gas tanks again in a couple more months, you miss the story.