The Future of CAR: Declare
Victory and Get Out!

From “When Nerds and World Collide:
Reflections on the Development of Computer Assisted Reporting,” ©
1999, The Poynter Institue
for Media Studies.

By Philip Meyer

The time has come to abandon
“computer assisted reporting" –  CAR. It’s an obsolete
concept that is starting to get in the way of our understanding of the real
battles that we need to fight and win if we are to save the soul of journalism.

CAR is an embarrassing reminder that we are
entering the 21st century as the only profession in which computer users feel
the need to call attention to themselves. All of the
other professions take computers for granted.

For example:

My cousin Bob Meyer is a retired
accountant, and he uses a computer to audit the books of his boat club, the
Marco Island Sail and Power Squadron. He doesn’t call himself a
computer-assisted accountant.

My daughter Melissa Meyer is an
environmental designer in Coral Gables, Fla. She does her creative work on a
computer. She doesn’t call herself a computer assisted designer.

My cousins Max and Richard Benne are
farmers in St. Joseph County, Mich. They use computers to calculate
depreciation on their equipment and to calibrate the fertilizer applications
for their corn and soybean fields. They don’t call themselves computer
assisted farmers.

Let’s forget about the computer and
start talking about, and organizing around, what we really want to do.
Here’s what I think that is:

Journalism today is in a battle for
survival against the forces that would merge it with entertainment,
advertising, and public relations. The information age has created such a
confusing buzz of voices that it tempts us all to sacrifice almost anything for
attention – including truth.

What the practitioners of CAR have been
after – whether consciously or not – is a higher standard of truthtelling. Our response to the information age has been
to learn to manage larger bodies of information with increasingly powerful
analytic tools, leading to a more exact definition of truth. As it happens, a
computer is helpful in doing that But the computer
itself is not the goal, nor does it define what we are trying to do. We are
trying to push journalism toward science. Almost everybody else, it seems on
most days, is trying to push it toward art.

Pushing journalism toward art can justify
or mask the merger of reporting and advocacy. It can facilitate the
entertainment function of journalism – and we should never deny that
entertainment is one of our functions. It can lead to a subjective form of
truth in the postmodernist, phenomenological sense. But it will not, in the
long run, lead to the building of credibility and trust that journalism needs
if it is to survive as an independent information specialty.

One response to information overload has
been the elevation of spin. When attention-getting is more important than
discovering and imparting the truth, the marketplace rewards those who are
skilled at creating appearances. Our goal needs to be to find a way to help the
marketplace reward the truth-tellers. The demand is a given. With so much
effort devoted to crafty distortion, the market value of truth has to rise as a
function of its scarce supply. All a media company has to do is find a way to
brand it and sell it.

Our little piece of this action should be
the application of scientific method to the practice of journalism. We need to
focus on the time-tested methods of overcoming wishful thinking, superstition,
selective perception, and the other human frailties that hinder the acquisition
of knowledge. We need to build a force in journalism that rewards critical
thinking and the skeptical testing of conventional wisdom. Yes, the computer is
a tool that can help us do that. But that’s all it is. Focus on the goal,
and then we can take the computer for granted, as the farmers and accountants
and designers already do.

My first computer encounter was with the
IBM 7090 at the Harvard Computation Center in 1966. Having failed miserably at
two successive attempts to predict Ohio election outcomes for the Akron Beacon Journal, I was using my Nieman year
to study social science research methods. I started with a course for
sophomores in which each student was allotted two minutes of the 7090’s
CPU time. My 120 seconds produced several crosstabs and significance tests from
a survey of junior college students, using Harvard Data-Text, a higher-level
programming language that was the harbinger of Statistical Package for the
Social Sciences (SPSS).

For the second semester, I did advanced
work in a graduate course after negotiating a deal with Dwight Sargent, curator
of the Nieman Foundation. He gave me $100 to buy
computer time in exchange for writing an article for Nieman
Reports.

I was back on the job in the Knight
Newspapers Washington bureau only a few weeks when the Detroit riot broke out,
and I was dispatched to help the staff of the Free
Press. The call came at
noon, and that night I was riding with the National
Guard amid the burning buildings and sniper fire of 12th Street. When the shooting
ended and the fires were out, I proposed a survey of the riot neighborhoods to
discover the riot’s underlying causes, applying the principles I had just
learned at Harvard.

Of course we used a computer to analyze the
results. I recruited University of Michigan professors John Robinson and Nathan
Caplan and computer programmer Judith Goldberg to
help with the design and analysis. Goldberg did the crosstabs with Filter Tau,
a program more primitive than Harvard’s but good enough. It ran on an IBM
360/40.

The response to that project inspired a
long-term commitment by me and my management to this new form of journalism
– defined not by the computer, but by the application of social science
research methods to reporting. Executive editor Lee Hills later wrote to me
that the survey was an important factor in the decision of the Pulitzer jury to
give the 1968 prize for general local reporting to the staff of the Free Press. The Kerner Commission called
the survey one of the few “brilliant exceptions” to the generally
dismal performance of the news media in covering riots.

While based in Washington, I became a
roving local reporter, helping members of Knight’s then-small group of
newspapers with stories, mostly relating to the civil rights and anti-war movements, that needed bigger investigative power than
conventional methods could muster.

The first description of this as computer
reporting that I can remember was when a Newsweek
profile in 1968 called me
“a computer reporter.” The application of social science research
methods was too complicated a frame. Computers were familiar, in concept if not
in general use, and so that became the popular definition of what I was doing.

By this time, I was writing my own programs
in Data-Text. Harvard had produced the software on a government grant and
placed it in the public domain. I bought it for $10, the price of the 7-track
tape. And I located several computer centers that offered 7090 or 7094 time at
cut rates while the 360 generation of machines was capturing market share. My
statistical skills increased. For a 1968 study of black attitudes in Miami, I
used factor analysis to sort out the varieties of black militancy with guidance
from CNN’s Bill Schneider, then a Harvard graduate student.

In the 1969-1970 academic year, I took a leave of absence from Knight to write Precision Journalism with money from and under the watchful eye of The
Russell Sage Foundation. The book covered polls, field experiments, and
analysis of public records. The title was suggested by Everett Dennis, who had
coined the expression to contrast with “the new journalism” being
practiced by those who applied fiction techniques to reporting.

That led to another error in framing.
Because my most visible work had been with various forms of survey research,
precision journalism became identified primarily with polls. While more
accurate than the computer frame, it still did not capture the broad sweep of
the concept as described in the first chapter of the first edition of Precision Journalism. Polls, when done correctly, are part of scientific
method, but the concept is meant to cover all applicable forms of scientific
method, including public records and experiments.

My first public records application came in
1972 when I took time out from election coverage to help Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele with their criminal justice
investigation. The Philadelphia Inquirer was by then a Knight newspaper, and I
worked out a coding scheme and rudimentary sample design, then
wrote the analysis program in Data-Text. By that time, IBM 7090 cost was down
to $75 per hour – by the wall clock, not CPU time – and the three of us did the
analytic work at a private computer center in suburban Maryland. In the tabloid
reprint of their story (although not in the newspaper), Barlett
and Steele included a sidebar crediting me with a “sophisticated computer
analysis.” The criteria for distinguishing it from an
unsophisticated computer analysis was not defined, but, once again,
the computer was used to define the work. My field experiments came much later,
after I switched to journalism education. At the University of North Carolina
in Chapel Hill, I have sent student reporters into the field to measure the
courtesy of motorists, the racial prejudice of pedestrians, underage alcohol
sales, and the knowledge of pharmacists about the AIDS protection capabilities
of different brands of condoms. In each case, we used computers without feeling
the need to mention it.

To emphasize that what I was doing was
social science as well as journalism, I did two things. I archived data,
starting with the Detroit riot survey, with the Institute for Research in
Social Science at Chapel Hill to make it available for secondary analysis by
scholars and graduate students. And I found opportunities for my own scholarly
publishing, starting with a reworking of my Miami civil rights stories for Public Opinion Quarterly (33:2 1969).

After three decades, the time has come to
move away from the CAR frame and toward a social science frame. I don’t
know what label to substitute for CAR. “Precision journalism”
sounds dated. We need something that captures the notion in a fresh way. As
reporters, we seek to draw generalizations that have more power than anecdotes
or casual interviewing. “Scientific journalism,” which is how one
French translation of “precision journalism” comes out, sounds too
pretentious.

Whatever the new term, let’s give up
on CAR. Computers are used in so many different ways, even in the newsroom,
that it no longer defines us, if it ever did. The time has come to declare CAR
victorious and move on to a fresher, more ambitious concept. We need it,
and so does the world.