Computer Assisted Reporting

George Kennedy – The Missouri Group
Hi. I'm George Kennedy. I'm here today with David Herzog, academic advisor to the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting. We're going to talk a little bit about what NICAR is and maybe more basically what computer assisted reporting itself is. So, David, why don't we begin with my asking you that question, those questions? The first of which would be what is NICAR?

David Herzog – Academic Advisor, National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting
NICAR stands for the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting. And it was actually founded here at the University of Missouri as the Missouri Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting back in 1989. And then, since then, NICAR, excuse me, MICAR and the Missouri School of Journalism kind of- kind of merged the program and launched NICAR back in the early 1990s. And what NICAR does is NICAR serves as a place where journalists can go to learn about doing computer systems reporting. They can—journalists can learn how to get databases from government agencies and manipulate them using standard computer software like spreadsheet programs or database manages. NICAR also operates a database library in which we process around 40 databases for our members and make those available at a nominal cost. And we—this is a great service because journalists themselves don't have to go through all the work of obtaining the databases from federal government agencies and cleaning them up themselves. We do that work for them and then pass the data along to the journalists.

George Kennedy
Okay. That's interesting, but it leaves the question, I suspect, in the minds of a good many students at least. And that is, what is it exactly about computer assisted reporting that makes it worthy of that modifier?

David Herzog
We call—it's computer assisted reporting because, if you do the data analysis, that's not—you're not at the end of the reporting process yourself. What you do is you analyze the data, maybe find something interesting, a few nuggets for your story, and then you can pursue those pieces of information better. And also computer assisted reporting can be helpful in that, if you have a hunch about something and you get information anecdotally from your sources, computer assisted reporting can help you nail down information you get from your sources and quantify how big a problem is and give your readers or viewers some idea of the scope.

George Kennedy
How hard is it to become a computer assisted reporter and, if somebody wanted to get into that, where would they begin?

David Herzog
I think it's no more difficult than doing other kind of reporting other than make—say becoming an expert in doing traditional reporting or investigative reporting where you're using documents. What I think it takes to really succeed is curiosity of saying, "Okay, I wonder if there's a database out there that could help me answer the questions that I have?" It takes persistence, so if you identify a database that's out there, then you have to be able to go and actually get it from a government agency and figure out ways to respond to them when they throw obstacles at you. So I think you need to be curious and you also have to have a good reporter's drive.

George Kennedy
And you'd need some skills, presumably—

David Herzog
Right.

George Kennedy
That one could acquire, at least in part, with the help of NICAR, right?

David Herzog
Right. The skills that you need are—there's some real basic skills. One is being able to identify where data is on the internet and download it. And then, after you download it, you have to be able to take a look at it and evaluate it and say, "Okay, is this good data? Is this bad data? How dirty is my data?" And then you have to be able to put it into something like a spreadsheet and then do some analysis and try to get trends out of the information out of your data.

George Kennedy
Great, great. Suppose that somebody wanted to learn more about this, where would they go?

David Herzog
A good place to go to learn how to do this is through NICAR. NICAR has what are called computer assisted reporting boot camps that we conduct three times a year at the Missouri School of Journalism. And also we have computer assisted reporting workshops that we take around the country as well. We—in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, we were doing a boot camp in San Diego right after we did the boot camp here in Columbia, Missouri. So we had—we did our traditional boot camp out in San Diego. We've also been in places like New York City, Miami; so there are opportunities to learn this in different parts of the country too.

George Kennedy
NICAR, I assume, has a website of its own—

David Herzog
Yes.

George Kennedy
Probably NICAR.org. If somebody went to that website, what would they find?

David Herzog
The NICAR website is data.nicar.org.

George Kennedy
Oh, okay.

David Herzog
And if you go there, what you would find is you would find information about the different databases that we have in our database library. We operate an online data store where, for many of our databases, you can register at the store and then use your credit card to purchase data and then download the data. And you can also get resources that are helpful at the IRE website which is ire.org. IRE has a great resource center where you can download things like tip sheets, which will walk you through, say, doing some calculations in excel or using a database manager to match two pieces of information. And also there are story examples, so you can go in there and look for stories that have been done using computer assisted reporting and get an idea of what journalists have already done.

George Kennedy
That's great, David. Thank you very much.

David Herzog
Thank you, George.

George Kennedy
And that website, once again, is data.nicar.org.