Computer Assisted Reporting
Spring 1997
Class Meets: Tuesdays 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Professor: Drew Sullivan, Work phone: (212) 621-7639 (The Associated Press, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, 5th floor - Special Assignment Team, 10020), email: drew@ap.org, alternate email: drew@nicar.org
Office Hours: By appointment
Class Objective: Public records have been the mainstay of good beat and investigative reporting for years. But times are changing. No longer are records stored in dusty file drawers or shelves, but rather on the optical disks, hard drives and tapes of mainframe and desk top computers. Soon, paper records may well disappear and all records will be stored as electronic images or database files. If we're to continue doing our jobs, we will have to know the ins and outs of these systems.
Records in electronic format are also, in may ways, more useful to the clever reporter. By utilizing database searching and analyzing techniques, we can use public records in ways we couldn't use paper records. No longer are you the victim of a filing system that organizes data in ways that are not useful to you (say alphabetically). Now you can sort records by those attributes that are important ot you for a particular story (say chronologically, by magnitude or geographically).
With these more sophisticated tools, journalism has crossed the line into the field of social science. Journalists run regression analyses to determine how race plays a factor in lending or how neighborhood income plays a factor in neighborhood test scores.
The purpose of this course is to provide a framework and a reference point for you to build upon. In essence, it is to help you help yourself. This will be done with heavy doses of both the theoretical and the practical. My intent is to demystify computers and data and, hopefully, make students aware of how much fun this can be.
This is not a math or computer science course and you will not be expected to know any difficult math or computer concepts. You will be asked to use your basic math skills (about 5th grade level) to do some tasks. But because it is applied math (i.e. balancing a city budget), even those who have had trouble with math in the past should not find it difficult and you might actually find it fun.
First and foremost, this is a journalism course. Almost every concept will be directly applied to journalism. Most measures of your performance will be in the application of the lessons you have learned to journalism.
Grades: Your grade will be based on the items listed below. Attendance is a very strong component of your grade; each missed class is very difficult to make up because they are four hours each. I will not accept any excuses other than a death in the immediate family or a severe illness. In the case of the latter, a doctor's note is required. On the second missed class, your grade drops one letter. The third missed class results in another drop in a letter grade. Academic dishonesty will result in an immediate F and the Dean's office will be notified.
Grades are based on the following components:
Helping other students: Unlike other courses, students are allowed to help each other on certain projects. Every student is responsible for turning in a project but that doesn't mean that you can not turn to your fellow students for some help. The end product must be your own. When you benefit from the help of another student, you should find some way to document their participation.
Books and Required reading: There will be no text for this course. You will be required to read one book, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, by John Allen Paulos. You will also be given handouts during the semester and you will be required to purchase other handouts.
Recommended Reading: The following texts are not required but are strongly recommended. They will help you greatly at certain points in the course and an enterprising soul who digested all of these would find themselves well on their way to being a Renaissance journalist.
Schedule
(subject to change based on class performance)
Week 1: Introduction to computer-assisted reporting. Technology in the news industry. Assign semester project.
Week 2: Assign scholarly paper. Bits and bytes: what is data and how is it stored. Data formats and standards. Nuts, bolts, hardware and software. Importing and exporting data. Finding, requesting and negotiating for data. Hands-on.
Week 3: Introduction to spreadsheets. Hands-on.
Week 4. Advanced spreadsheets. Introduction to visualizing data
Week 5: Databases. Structured Query Language (SQL).
Week 6: Advanced SQL. Programming in FoxPro. Scholarly paper due.
Week 7: Mid-term. Review of SQL and spreadsheets.
Week 8: Avoiding the computer-assisted libel suit. Data integrity. Cleaning data.
Week 9: Mainframe data. Downloading 9-track tapes. Status report 1 due.
Week 10: Visit to the AP. Downloading tapes. Writing and organizing the CAR story.
Week 11: The Internet. Downloading data. Analyzing data.
Week 12: Mapping data. Statistical analysis. Status report 2 due.
Week 13: Statistical Analysis.
Week 14: Semester project due. Final Exam
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