Overview of CAR

Panel at the global investigative journalism conference in Geneva 22th of April 2010
By nils.mulvad@kaasogmulvad.dk

Computer-Assisted Reporting has spread from US to the rest of the World. But still it’s only rarely spread.

Computer-Assisted Reporting spreading

Main tendencies today
1.    Journalists and medias are behind due to the fact that we hate numbers, data and information technology.
2.    We have the old school CAR being around for 20 years and connected to the PC: Excel-spreadsheet, Access-database managers, mapping, statistics as the main resources.
3.    We have a tradition of fighting for data and documents, which now are spreading to a lot of countries.
4.    Data is coming in floods now – and also new tools for working with data
5.    The main target now move to presentation on the web, meaning we see the environment of CAR-journalists melting together with the online media production. So it’s now gathering, analyzing and presentation by setting up automatic  tools. It is also melting this together with crowd sourcing and social media.

Training cover
The training at the global investigative journalism conference then cover:
1.    Find web-content
2.    Basic CAR-tools
3.    Present and share on the web – and other advanced stuff.
Then today these tools are also part of most of the other presentations at the conference. There’s often an element of the use of these tools in every good project today.

Some links to examples of the status
Using interactive graphics on the web:

European song contest from Norwegian paper VG

Word train from New York Times

Inaugural Words from US-Presidents (New York Times)

Using interactive graphics on the web and combine it with automatic generating of text:

High death rates for unskilled workers

Gathering data by robots, structure it and present it as part of an online media:

Texas Tribune