THE DOWNSIDE OF WONDERLAND

The wonderful world of high tech has become firmly entrenched in most of our newsrooms, and life for some journalists is easier, or at least faster. But some editors are beginning to question whether all the new technology is helping or hurting the quality of our work.

Some of the new equipment and methods are clearly beneficial.

* Reporters covering Hurricane Andrew link their laptop computers into cellular phones and file stories by flashlight while sitting on piles of rubble.

* Copy clerks quickly run the daily mountain of news releases through optical character readers, and fodder for briefs pops up in the system without a keystroke.

* Documents, statements, and research spew out of fax machines, and the same devices are used to speed FOI requests to government agencies within minutes after the requests are signed.

* During the gulf war, Jennifer Belton, research director at The Washington Post, creates a database on a single, small computer disk that gives correspondents in the field lengthy descriptions and specifications of very ship, aircraft, vehicle, and weapon used by all allied and enemy forces.

In some newsrooms, the use of computers to gather news is doubling and tripling each year. Meanwhile, many editors are starting to worry that too much emphasis is being placed on the technology and not enough on nurturing the more traditional, basic journalistic skills.

"All the computers and high-tech hardware in the world won't produce top-quality journalism without the right people doing the right things," says John Carroll, editor of the Baltimore Sun. "It's crazy to buy some computers and assume you're ready to start cranking out investigative projects."

William Casey, The Washington Post's new director of computer reporting, echoes Carroll's view. "Computers are tools -- useful, valuable tools," he says, "but unless their use is based on a firm foundation of good ideas from reporters and editors, don't get your expectations up."

Interviews with senior editors from twenty-five large and mid-sized news organizations generated mixed reviews for the computers' effect on productivity. Twenty percent of those questioned said the use of computers reduced the "get-it-in-the-paper" time of projects, and 20 percent said there was no measurable change from pre-computer days, but 60 percent said the magic boxes slowed production significantly. The reasons ranged from unfamiliarity with the computers or software to the fact that reporters were dealing with far larger pools of information or were spending more time digging in dry wells.

When asked whether computers improved the overall quality and read-ability of stories, 28 percent of the editors said they saw improvement, and 16 percent noted no change, but 56 percent said the impact, the relevance of the topic, and the overall quality had diminished.

"A well-structured computer database can generate enough statistics to kill the best-written story," says Mary Pat Flaherty, formerly special editor and Sunday columnist for the late Pittsburgh Press, now metro projects editor for The Washington Post. "Reporters must fight to keep the human factor in their copy. Editors must keep all but the most relevant statistics in a box or out of the story. Numbers, even those never before reported, should be used only when examples of real people can't be gotten."

Inaccurate information is another concern. Most of us who have done many stories based on databases have learned that it's only too easy for bad data to get into stories.

In the early days of computers, the watchword was always "GIGO -- garbage in, garbage out." But many journalists have either forgotten it or never learned it in the first place. Rows and rows of figures flashing across the computer screen or streaming forth on printouts can be seductive to the reporter desperate for the crucial calculation on which to hang a story.

For example, Flaherty and I had been told for years that blacks had to wait longer than whites for kidney transplants but that this was almost statistically impossible to prove.

Finally, we were able to get our hands on a computerized tally listing the age, race, sex, location, and waiting time for 13,888 patients who had received kidneys nationwide during a two-year period.

We shoved the raw data into a database we had created, and the computer spat out the fact that blacks were waiting almost 200 percent longer for the organ than whites. It was a hell of a story and we started writing it. But, scanning the geographic breakdown, we were puzzled by the large numbers of blacks getting transplants in Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, states that have low black populations.

Nearing deadline, we went back to the government source of the data and found that they had erroneously listed all Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans as blacks. The accurate figure was that blacks were waiting 59 percent longer than whites for their new kidneys. Still an important story that got national play, but we had come awfully close to blowing our credibility.

"Verify. Verify. Verify," cautions David Ashenfelter, assistant city editor of the Detroit Free Press, who speaks from experience. He once did a computer study of absenteeism in the Michigan legislature and based the rankings on the number of more than 1,300 roll call votes that each of the 183 lawmakers had missed. Late on Saturday afternoon, as the pages were being pasted up for the Sunday piece, he discovered that he had failed to calculate the absenteeism to the second decimal place.

"The new calculations changed the ranking of more than a dozen of the legislators," he recalls. "We had to frantically make major changes in the story and redo a complex chart on deadline.

"Bad data and good data have one thing in common -- they both look impressive on a computer screen," Ashenfelter adds.

Dwight Morris, editor for special investigations for the Los Angeles Times, has years of experience stroking data from the Federal election Commission into his computers and generating important stories. But three weeks before last November's election, under deadline pressure, he accepted government data without double-checking it. The story was about the top twenty-five contributors of soft money to political parties; in the thousands of listings he examined, the FEC had accidentally reported $ 1.5 million in contributions twice. As a result, Morris's published story attributed significantly larger contributions to two individuals than they had actually given.

"I violated my own long-standing rule of never letting anything get published without first comparing crucial computer output with the original hard copy of the information," Morris says. "The rule with computers has got to be, Verify every piece of data coming out. Don't rely on a computer to prevent mistakes."

There's even need for caution and double-checking when working with on-line services like DataTimes, Vu/Text, Nexis, and Dialog, which offer instant access to work done by other reporters in hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and television news programs.

"There is no doubt that these reference databases are a great asset for the reporter trying to quickly background a story or a project," says Deborah Howell, chief of Newhouse Newspapers' Washington bureau. "It hasn't happened here, but the potential for trouble is great. There are reporters who we all know will pick up a direct quote from one of these databases and dump it in a story without checking it out. If editors don't watch it, these computers could make careless reporters even more careless," she says.

The bottom line is that computer-assisted journalism is just that -- computers assisting us in getting the story. They cannot and should not be allowed to replace the basic journalistic skills required to make a story interesting and accurate.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe