By Justin Kier

Six years ago, Mark Schaver says, he was the average reporter covering the city desk and police beats in Louisville, Ky.

A year later , he developed the computer

assisted reporting skills that separated him from many of his peers.

“If someone is interested in investigative journalism then they need to develop CAR

skills,” says Schaver. “A lot of reporters think it’s complex, but CAR skills help with a lot of really simple things.”

Schaver is the Computer Assisted Reporting director for the Courier-Journal in Louisville. He learned CAR to become a better reporter. Schaver is known in the journalism community for his depth reporting and his blog of the same name.
Depthreporting.com started out as an interoffice email that expanded to a website that features computer assisted reporting projects and pointers.

“I’m an accidental blogger, and was trying to improve my skills more or less daily,” says Schaver. “It’s useful for me because it forces me to stay on top of what I’m doing and it helps you to know what resources are out there.”

(Link to Schaver’s Website)

Schaver doesn’t like the ‘artificial distinction between reporters and computer assisted reporters.’ He says computer assisted reporting skills are a simple prerequisite for ‘depth-reporting.’ Other reporters are at a major disadvantage.

“They’re doing it in less efficient ways or they depend on others,” says Schaver. “People waste time doing it the hard way.”

Schaver associates dilapidated housing with computer-assisted reporting.

An association created from a story he presented at the Charlotte NICAR conference in the spring of 2003. It pitted the CAR and investigative reporters of the Courier-Journal against a negligent developer and a truckload of data.

“We found one single landlord, who lived in a mansion, and owned all of these dilapidated houses,” says Schaver. “It was hard to get at the records because the county kept the housing records in an old main frame,” says Schaver. “The guy who knew how it worked had retired and the people who were there didn’t know how it worked.”

The county was going to charge a hefty $120 per hour fee for the work. So Schaver requested the data in print form and entered the data manually. The task would have been colossal if not for his CAR background.

“I read computer manuals,” says Schaver.

(Link to Schaver’s IRE.org tip sheet that outlines his approach to the story.

Multimedia skills are becoming a major focus at Schaver’s place of employment, he says.

Newspapers, like the Courier-Journal, face declining readership and loss of advertising revenues to the web. This has forced the Courier-Journal to think multimedia. The paper is changing from a nine to five mentality to a twenty-four-hour mindset.

“We are writing for the web first,” says Schaver. “We’re putting a tremendous emphasis on audio, video, web components, and a lot of database stuff.”

Schaver encourages college students to become multimedia savvy, but especially print journalists.

“The skills are wanting,” says Schaver. “We don’t know anything about audio and video…so anybody who has those skills…it’s a gold rush for those skills.”

So what CAR skills do college students need when they hit the work force? Schaver says they need to know the basics like Microsoft Excel and Access. He suggests learning to sort, sum, do pivot tables, ins and outs, along with simple formulas for Excel. For Access users, Schaver says data entry, SQL(structured query language), sorting and summing functions are needed.

“A third skill for newspaper journalists is to do GIS mapping,” says Schaver. “It’s a really simple skill, and these are the very basics.”

Learning computer jargon seems scary for some journalists, but Schaver says help is out there.

“Through NICAR, it’s a like minded community,” says Schaver. “We all need help. The field is vast, and we’re all ignorant.”

Schaver gave his opinion to Poynteronline of what CAR’s, or depth reporting as he labels it, place is within the industry.

“I think CAR, whatever it’s called, will always be a niche, a useful and valuable niche, but always a niche. I don’t think the more hardcore skills are any more widely spread then they’ve ever been. I don’t detect much interest among reporters here to learn the ins and outs of SQL, the nitty-gritty of statistics, or the theories behind data mining. They got into journalism to be writers, not statisticians or computer jockeys. And as staffs shrink and demands for productivity rise, most would say they just don’t have time to learn that stuff, even if they have the desire.”

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• Danielle Cervantes, San Diego Union-Tribune

• Dave Davis, Cleveland Plain Dealer

• Dan Keating, Washington Post

• Tom Merriman, Fox 8 Cleveland

• Doug Oplinger, Akron Beacon Journal

• Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite, St. Petersburg Times

• Mark Schaver, Louisville Courier-Journal