by Joel Simon with Carol Napolitano
Simon is the Americas program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, in New York. Napolitano is the project team leader at the Omaha World-Herald.

"I'm still stunned by it. Two years ago if you had told me that the Internet was the greatest reportorial tool since the telephone, I'd have laughed. It was still just for us geeks."
    -- Stephen C. Miller, The New York Times

related stories: How (My Computer and) I Got That Story Detroit Free Press: Examining a Big School Test by Heather Newman Omaha World-Herald: Delineating Crime by Carol Napolitano Washington Post: Questioning the Cops by Jo Craven Dateline NBC: Pushing a Regulator by Andrew Lehren USA Today: Debunking a "Trend" by Paul Overberg

Ricardo Sandoval was one of those geeks. The turning point for him had come way back on July 1, 1993, after a deranged gunman in San Francisco killed eight and wounded six. All Sandoval knew about the shooter, who had killed himself, too, was that he was from the Los Angeles area. Sandoval, then a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, used an electronic bulletin board -- a precursor to the World Wide Web -- to plug the man's name into a database of real estate records. There he found home and business addresses for the gunman as well as the names of his neighbors. He e-mailed the information to fellow Examiner reporter Jim Herron Zamora, already on a plane to L.A. to pursue that end of the story.

The killings at 101 California Street helped make Sandoval, now the Mexico correspondent for Knight Ridder, a technophile. These days he crunches large volumes of numbers with software, analyzing such arcana as import/export data, and downloads huge files from the Internet. He accesses e-mail from the Sierra Madre. Recently, while reporting a story about pesticide use in Mexico, he went online and found out which pesticides banned in the United States had been exported across the border.

But the news today is that there are so many Sandovals. Sometimes we fail to appreciate the pace at which technology has been changing our jobs. Think for a moment: palm-sized computers provide features useful to newsgathering that were not available on the most powerful laptops just five years ago. With a well-organized laptop and a good Internet connection, a reporter in virtually any part of the world has access to the same information -- whether from his own archived files or another database -- as someone in the newsroom. With digital cameras, photographers file their shots through e-mail so quickly that an editor can look at the image and, before the event is over, call back on a cell phone to request a different angle.

It is in computer-assisted reporting where the real revolution is taking place, not only on the big analytical projects but also in nuts-and-bolts newsgathering. New tools and techniques have made it possible for journalists to dig up vital information on deadline, to quickly add depth and context. Even spreadsheet analysis and other serious number crunching -- once the province of investigators and nerds -- are increasingly being used on beats.

"The whole reporting world is going crazy with this stuff," says J. Robert Port, a special assignment editor at The Associated Press. "It's changed the whole drill . . . . I can find out if a person has been sued, or divorced, or whether he or she has a criminal record. I can locate within five minutes any person in the United States who uses a credit card or has a bank account, and I can probably locate his or her family members and address history in less than thirty minutes. This may not work for Ted Kaczynski, but it will work for just about everyone else."

The use of databases and Web searches on breaking stories has become nearly routine. For a recent story on land purchases by members of the International Olympic Committee, AP reporters on computers in New York combed through databases of real estate records in Utah. When a clam boat went down off the coast of New Jersey early this year, AP researchers culled from their databases the address of the company that owned the vessel and the date of the last time she was inspected, as well as the address history of a missing crew member and the phone numbers of his neighbors. All in half an hour.

A lightbulb went off for Port in 1996 when a commuter plane crashed in rural Georgia. An AP reporter used a database called PhoneDisc to instantly acquire the phone numbers of everyone in the vicinity. Neighbors described the scene, and the AP put a detailed story on the wire before a single reporter could get there.

The spread of the new technology in the last few years has clearly made reporters faster and much more productive. At a higher level, it is doing more than that. Even as computer-reporting techniques spread into the main newsroom, adding depth and context, they continue to make possible the longer, analytic projects. (See the "How [My Computer and I] Got That Story" articles in the following pages.) Steadily improving technology, as well as increasing levels of skill at using it, has led to better stories. At its best, computer-assisted reporting helps get reporters beyond anecdotal research to a place where they can be more critical in their thinking and more definitive in their findings. The father of what he calls "precision journalism" -- applying social science methods, such as survey research or public-record analysis, often with the aid of computers -- is Phil Meyer, a Knight professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "Reporting used to be like hunting and gathering for food," Meyer says. "All you had to do was get the information and bring it back. After food became plentiful, interest went to processing and packaging."

Computer-assisted reporting, he continues, allows reporters to dig into this "overabundance of information to find what's relevant. It's a sieve, and it's a way to uncover concealed patterns that aren't visible with ordinary reporting."

Computers have "given us at least the ability to be less reactive," says Steve Doig, a former Miami Herald reporter and editor who now holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University. "Instead of looking at a few trees in the forest, we can look at the entire forest and state with authority the problem."

Over the last decade, the variety and complexity of newsroom computer skills has mushroomed. From simple use of the Internet to the analysis of complex data and social statistics, from spreadsheets to complicated mapping to setting up intranets and other internal newsroom data-delivery systems -- no one can be expected to do it all. "Ten years ago I was a master of all parts of computer-assisted reporting," says Doig. "Now, it would be unrealistic for anybody to think he or she commands expertise across the spectrum."

As the field matures and broadens a dispute has emerged about its focus. Meyer, for one, thinks the term "computer-assisted reporting" should be abandoned. The words now "mean a lot of different things to different people who don't have a lot in common," he says. "Many journalism schools, including my own, have decided it means online searching, and that's it. We need a more precise term. We're losing it to online searching and to those applications that are just going through public records and coming up with lists." Those who are interested in "the deeper analytic techniques, finding patterns that aren't visible to the naked eye," Meyer says, "should band together and, maybe out of self-protection, form some kind of professional association to keep our identity clear."

But others argue that the computer-assisted reporting tent ought to be a very big one. Brant Houston, a former reporter in Boston, Kansas City, and Hartford and now the executive director of the University of Missouri-based Investigative Reporters and Editors (www.ire.org), says simple and complex-scale computer reporting both have their place, and that, in any event, a reporter with limited skills can build on those skills. "It improves our credibility whenever we give stories more depth and more context," he says. "Everyone should be invited to this party."

The computer-reporting revolution has spread thanks in part to techno-evangelists like Houston. Under him, IRE has continued to push computer skills via the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, which IRE runs with the University of Missouri's School of Journalism. NICAR focuses, to a large extent, on obtaining, understanding, and analyzing electronic public records, and it has trained some 12,000 reporters and editors over the last five years in "boot-camp" seminars as well as larger conferences. (The next is a joint presentation with The Boston Globe, set for March 11-14 in Boston, with some 500 expected to attend.)

On a smaller scale, Bill Dedman, former director of computer-assisted reporting at the AP, holds seminars in newsrooms, focusing on the use of computer techniques to improve deadline and beat reporting. These can range, he says, from learning more effective Web searching to building small local databases (comparing county tax rates, for example) to getting and analyzing public data (such as matching campaign contributions to government contracts). Dedman, who also teaches a journalism course at Northwestern and writes part-time for The New York Times, says overemphasis on the newest gizmos and the biggest projects can alienate editors who want to produce quality breaking news on a budget. Alongside the big projects, he says, "we need more computer-assisted paragraphs and sentences."

Dedman has his own recent examples of such deadline paragraphs, from a piece he wrote for the Times after last year's fatal shooting of a Capitol police officer in Washington. He was assigned to look into the background of the shooter, who was from Illinois. Using the Internet, Dedman located a reference to a security consultant who formerly worked for the Secret Service. Another search turned up the consultant's Web site, including an e-mail address. Dedman sent the man a late-night message and heard back immediately -- from Fiji, where the consultant was vacationing. The consultant steered Dedman to a publicly available Secret Service report about the minds of assassins; that became the basis for his story.

Sarah Cohen, formerly the training director at NICAR, points out that the computer-assisted reporting revolution was, until recently, a bottom-up movement, driven largely by a few mid-sized newspapers and by individual reporters. Now such reporters are everywhere. At The Hartford Courant, for example, Stephanie Reitz, a reporter with the Manchester bureau (and a self-described "math idiot"), used a spreadsheet to report a story tracking voting patterns in local elections in November. Reitz first got hooked on computer reporting back in 1995 when she dumped the Waterbury municipal budget into a spreadsheet and quickly debunked the mayor's claim that he was keeping a tight lid on spending. Today, her hard drive is full of local-government databases, from property tax records to local dog-license data ("Lots of great unlisted phone numbers in there," she says).

At Newsday, Ford Fessenden was able to flesh out TWA's safety history very quickly after Flight 800 hit the water. Doug Smith, who covers the Los Angeles Unified School District for the Los Angeles Times, used computer-assisted reporting and traditional shoe leather to assess complaints that the city was short-changing some neighborhoods in capital improvements. Computers, he says, did the "nearly impossible" task of making sense of the district's 1,000-page book on capital projects. Smith plugged the information into a database, analyzed the numbers, and mapped the projects. With traditional reporting, he was then able to sort out which complaints were legitimate.

Among the papers that have made significant investments in computer-assisted reporting are the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Omaha World-Herald, the Dayton Daily News, The Asbury Park Press, The Seattle Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Raleigh News & Observer, the San Jose Mercury News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, The Charlotte Observer, and The Miami Herald.

At the Herald, computer-assisted reporting specialist Neil Reisner works informally with other journalists to get them to use technology more effectively in their daily reporting. "A reporter who is not e-mail literate, who doesn't know how to use attached files, cannot do his job," he says. Reisner has used computer techniques on all sorts of stories -- from a study of school-district demographics to an analysis of boating-accident statistics to a Valentine's Day piece generated from demographic data about which neighborhoods in the Herald's circulation area contain the most single people.

Andy Lehren performs a similar function for Dateline NBC. But experts in the field say he is the only such full-time computer specialist in network news. The networks are behind the curve, even as local television struggles to catch up. Five years ago, Cohen says, hardly any TV people at all came to NICAR's sessions. Now they make up at least a third of the students.

Once the big newspapers get on board, they tend to do it in a big way. At The New York Times, says Stephen C. Miller, assistant to the technology editor, a thirty-person tech department, made up of reporters and editors like Miller, supports and trains colleagues on how to incorporate the new tools into reporting. The Times recently finished giving every reporter and editor a PC or Mac, with which they can work not only the Atex mainframe but also the Internet, via a Windows system. They increasingly do so, he says, not only because reporters are interested but because "management says, ‘hey, we spent a lot of money on this stuff, so use it.'"

Among Miller's recent tasks has been to design "How to Cover a Beat Electronically" tutorials for reporters. "There is so much stuff out there, I'm stunned by it. It's as if a virus suddenly infected everyone and made them put every scrap of information on the Web."

Meanwhile, the technology keeps improving and the resources keep expanding. New databases spread like kudzu, from the United Network for Organ Sharing (which contains an extensive database on organ transplants -- www.unos.org) to national telephone directories like Yahoo! People Search (www.four11.com), to the vast stores of U.S. government information available online, including campaign contribution records and analysis (www.vote-smart.org) and congressional testimony (http://thomas.loc.gov).

As online versions of newspapers proliferate on the Web, reporters can read what's going on everywhere from Colombia (www.elcolombiano.com) to Yemen (www.al-ayyam-yemen.com). Using new translation software, like Systran, available on the AltaVista Web site (www.altavista.com), you can translate text (or even Web pages) from German, Spanish, French, or Italian into a crude but understandable English.

Search functions are also improving. Super-fast modems are fueling the development of what are known as content-based retrieval systems, which allow users to search for graphic images and scan photo and video archives for a specific shot.

Content-based searches will likely make easier the journalistic use of satellite photographs, which can be used for reporting on hurricanes, forest fires, oil spills, or in monitoring troop movements halfway around the world. Christopher Simpson of American University's School of Communication says satellite images that once took months to retrieve can now be obtained in hours using the Internet and commercial services like Space Imaging (www.spaceimaging. com) or the French agency Spot Image (www.spot.com). Very recent photos, of course, can be expensive -- up to $5,000. But many others are cheap or free. The Department of Defense, for example, offered aerial imagery showing destruction in Iraq only a few hours after the bombing (available on the Federation of American Scientists site, www.fas.org). Satellite images, Simpson points out, can be used to illustrate stories on, say, urban sprawl or flood risk.

What's next? Who knows? We can be reasonably certain that the future belongs to reporters who become more and more computer literate. The development of more powerful databases, likely to be available to all reporters in the newsroom through internal intranets, will mean that vast resources, from real estate records to campaign contributions to tax files, can be at every reporter's fingertips.

And the equipment will get cheaper and better: computers will become smaller and more powerful, Internet connections will become faster, and communication technology will make everybody even easier to reach. Pagers, digital phones, e-mail-ready cell phones, and new devices like the Motorola Iridium phone (which has a single number that can be accessed any place in the world) will mean we will never be out of earshot of an editor. The next generation of palm-sized computers may be able to receive and send e-mail from anywhere on the planet.

Advances in voice-recognition software may make it possible for reporters to record interviews on a computer chip, and then instantly transcribe the interview to their PC. Software already on the market can transcribe clearly enunciated speech; in a few years, it may become possible to capture complex, overlapping conversations.

New software could end the trauma of lost notebooks and faulty memories. SourceTracker, developed by former computer-reporting editor George Landau after he left The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, allows a reporter to organize his or her interviews over the years into an easily searchable database that can be instantly retrieved when an old story comes back into play.

John Pavlik, who directs the Center for New Media at Columbia University, envisions that journalists may soon wear a Buck Rogers-like pair of glasses equipped to access the Internet on voice command and scroll information across the lens. A tiny camera mounted on the glasses could send video and audio feeds directly to a newsroom, so that another reporter or editor could also follow the event.

Farther down the road, probably a couple of decades if the research being conducted continues apace, journalists and sources on opposite coasts might find a way to be electronically "together." Max Nikias, who directs the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California, is developing "3D immersive" technology that would create the visual and aural sensation that people in different cities are sitting together around a conference table.

"There would be a 3D image on my left and when that person spoke it would sound like it was coming from the proper direction," says Nikias. He says such conferences would make possible complex presentations that can't be done well over the telephone. Or you could be somewhere in a desert or in a foreign hotel and feel as if you are sitting across the desk from your editors. That would be an advance, wouldn't it?

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