News beyond events and within context
The great majority of news reports we are called upon to write or read have at their center a "news event." By definition, these events have clearly defined beginnings and conclusions. Some news events involve scheduled occurrences such as city council meetings, sporting contests, elections and multi-agency task force raids on criminal suspects. Other events, such as fires, tornados and fatal automobile accidents are not planned.
Advanced Reporting seeks to place news events in larger contexts and looks at the processes behind the news. For example, the fatal automobile accident might have been precipitated when a tire on an SUV disintegrated or when someone lost control of a car after hitting a pothole.
While the accident was the event, the context of the accident might in the first case be defective tires or faulty automobile engineering. In the second case, the process might involve a general deterioration of roads throughout the city. This is the stuff of Advanced Reporting. We look at the processes behind the news, the larger context of news events. We tend to focus on the "why" and "how" questions after we already understand the who, what, when and where.
As a result, much emphasis in this class is placed on doing sound research and depth reporting. Class instruction, lab exercises and writing assignments are intended help students improve their ability to gather information and to place events of the day into a context that gives them meaning.
Some of the methods that we use in doing research for Advanced Reporting are often used by investigative reporters. Many of the methods fall under the larger umbrella of "Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR)." CAR is relatively new as a tool for reporters. Though its roots go back about 50 years, CAR as a formal discipline dates only to 1989.
In that year, Jim Brown at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) organized and hosted the first meeting of the National Institute for Advanced Reporting, or NIAR. Led by Brown and the likes of Elliot Jaspin, Dan Woods, Phil Meyer, Pat Stith and others, reporters from all over North America gathered each spring in Indianapolis to learn from one another the techniques of CAR.
By 1995, the movement had grown to the point that its training sessions went on the road, and a new organization was born, called the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR). Today NICAR is a subsidiary of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and it conducts many workshops and training sessions for journalists throughout the year. NICAR has affiliate organizations in other countries.
NICAR also publishes books and guides for journalists and provides assistance in acquiring and "cleansing" data sets useful to news operations. The lab manual used in this class is written by IRE and NICAR Executive Director Brant Houston.
