Submitted Abstract: What is the justification for including mapping to augment photojournalism and information graphics in a journalism curriculum? Computer-assisted reporting (CAR) methods diffuse slowly because few faculty have direct experience with them. In addition, most faculty in journalism schools are "word" people. How then will mapping ever become part of the curriculum?
We discuss these problems and describe our mapping project in a sophomore-level reporting class. This class analyzed crime statistics in Marion County, Indiana, the home county of IUPUI and the students. The paper will also describe the process the class used to learn ArcView and analyze the data.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Andy Schneider came to my campus in 1989 as the first occupant of the Riley Chair, a rotating chair for distinguished professionals at the Indiana University School of Journalism. Schneider exhibited frustration with computers though he had used them in more than half the stories he reported between 1986 and 1990. We had frequent talks about the lack of wide-spread diffusion of computers as a reporting tool even though Barlett and Steele, Phil Meyer and others had proven the importance of computers as reporting tools.
We decided to do something about it. We formed the National Institute for Advanced Reporting and scheduled our first national conference for the spring of 1990 on the Indianapolis campus. About 400 reporters and editors from across the nation and four foreign countries came to the "Conference on Advanced Investigative Methods for Journalists," which apparently was the first national conference on computer-assisted reporting (CAR) for working journalists. The first two of our six annual conferences were co-sponsored by the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).
The model of instruction we developed is still widely used by IRE conferences. We trained journalists to use computer software as a reporting tool and then trained them to train other journalists. It is a simple idea but effective. Journalists like to work with other journalists, not techo-nerds.
In 1990, many journalists did not know where to find the power switch on the university computers. Four years later, some of these same people were requesting training courses on SPSS and statistics. The 1990s saw a rapid diffusion of CAR as more journalists came to our six national conferences and to the IRE NICAR (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) bootcamps and conferences. At the same time, cost of computers plummeted while software became more powerful and easier to use. (A more complete history of our contributions to educating journalists, along with many others, may be found in "When Nerds and Words Collide: Reflections on the Development of Computer-Assisted Reporting", published in 1999 by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.)
Schneider and I offered a separate course in computer-assisted reporting and it was successful for the limited number of students who took it.
A struggle that all faculties have is how to keep the core curriculum (courses all majors must take) large enough to give students the important basic information and skills deemed essential but small enough to give the students some elective choices in their degree programs. Since journalism schools have been around for a long time, the core is already full of "essential" content. At our campus, we did it by developing a new course entitled "Computer Methods for Journalists." It is a freshman level course that is rich with the skills the students will need for the next four years and for the rest of their lives. It covers library research methods (hard copy and online, Nexis-Lexis searching, web-engine searching and how to use a spreadsheet using journalism examples). We spend no time on how to use Microsoft Word unlike our courses in the 1980s when we had to spend appreciable time on how to use a word processor (XyWrite in those days).
The best solution for the integration of reporting tools in the curriculum is for them to be used by many professors over many courses. Students may then see the integration of tool skills and the importance of those tools to journalism. Too often, tool skills are compartmentalized and only taught by those faculty with that speciality--visual communication left to photojournalists and graphics folks, data analysis left to the reseseach types and word crafting left to the reporters. We all ought to work more closely together. I just had an experience working as a photojournalist for an article for Scouting magazine. After the photo editor and I had made our selections, I made a set of enlarged contacts and sent them to the writer. I then called the writer to talk about the pictures and to see where his story was headed. He thanked me for the pictures saying, no photographer had ever done that for him before. As a result he made minor adjustments in the direction of his story. I hope the story will be better because two freelancers living in different areas of the country bothered to keep in touch on the development of the story.
In 1952 the late Wilson Hicks, editor of Life magazine, wrote eloquently of the fusion of words and pictures in his book Words and Pictures. (Hicks book was later reprinted in the book cited.)
"The most graphic reporting is eyewitness reporting. "I was there; I saw it happen; it was like this . . . .
"In journalistic print the firsthand account which comes closest to reproducing the actuality of an event is the picture story: good headlines plus good photographs plus good captions.
"Man, in understanding what happens around him, depends primarily on his sight, secondarily on his hearing. In journalism which makes use of words only, the words bear the entire burden of re-creating for the reader an experience undergone by someone else. Printed words being visual representations of spoken words, the sense of hearing is basically related to the act of reading. The eye in conveying sound symbols to the brain appropriates the work of the ear, so to speak, and performs to a very limited degree its own peculiar function which, to put it quite simply, is to see. In journalism which makes use of words and pictures, to the stimuli of sound symbols there are added the stimuli of the forms of reality represented in the photograph. Together these stimuli call forth a collaboration of the two senses by which the quality of a re-created experience is enormously increased and brought much closer to actual experience." (Hicks, 1973, p. 3).
Hicks termed the coming together of words and pictures--photojournalism. Hicks recognized that different processes were used to activate subjective responses in the reader. Hicks wrote that the verbal medium was discursive, that the reader proceeds in orderly visual moves through sentences. But, Hicks wrote, visual forms are not discursive.
"Thus there is a fundamental difference in the acts of eye and mind by which words and pictures are read. A "visual structure," for example a single black-and-white photograph, is taken in all at once by the reader. He may not thoroughly comprehend it at the first look, but at least he gets the general idea and, with a quick promise to himself to return to the picture, he goes on to the words. His eyes may move rapidly through the caption, or they may move slowly, depending on his perceptive capacity. Whatever the individual reaction, the important point is that picture and words not only are read in different ways, but also are read at different times, however close together those times may be. The picture is almost invariably read first; the common habit is for the reader's eyes to move back and forth from picture to words and back again to picture until the meaning expressed in each medium is completely understood." (Hicks, 1973, p. 4).
The principles in Hicks' essay were essentially supported by an elaborate study by Pegie Stark and Mario Garcia, Eyes on the News, published in 1990 by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Stark and Garcia use light-weight eye-tracking equipment attached to subjects' heads. Measurement of reader's eye movements through time could be made. Stimuli were printed newspapers in which elements on the page were manipulated. Variations included a story with and without a picture, a picture in color versus black and white, etc. Their research found that a reader's eyes go first to a picture, or other strong graphic element such as an information graphic, then to the picture caption, then to the headline of the story, then to the story. The implication is that if you want your story to be read, you had better have a strong picture with it. Reporters think, incorrectly, that the reader goes first to the headline, then reads the entire length of the story.
In my "Introduction to Visual Communication" class, I have often replicated the first stage of a two-stage experiment conducted by Gavriel Salomon and described in his book Interaction of Media, Cognition and Learning. In the first stage of the experiment, college students were asked to "describe, depict or represent" in whatever way they saw fit to take a stranger from one building on campus or another. Depending on whether the students wrote a paragraph of instructions or drew a map, they were classified as visual or verbal. About half drew a map and about half wrote instructions with a small minority doing both. In the second stage of the experiment, an educational task was designed with two methods of presenting content, one visual and one verbal. Students were randomly assigned to the two educational treatments which resulted in both matches and mismatches (verbal-verbal, visual-visual, verbal-visual and visual-verbal). The two matched groups were significantly quicker than the mismatched groups in completing the task accurately. Saloman concluded:
"Pictures do not communicate "better" than verbal descriptions; as a general rule one medium does not communicate better than another medium. Nor do pictures communicate better (when they do) because they are more similar to the content. Rather, pictures can communicate better to the extent that the symbolic codes they use come closer to, or are more congruent with, the internal representation that the receiver ought to generate, given his cognitive make-up and the requirements of the task. The same is true for other media. To the extent that one needs verbal mediation to solve a problem, a ready-made verbal presentation would save him some mental elaborations and hence will be a better--that is, mentally easier--presentation. The less that person is capable of producing the needed internal verbalization, the more a verbal presentation facilitates performance. Similarly, mathematical relations between variables are better communicated through graphs than through words, because a graph corresponds more closely to the internal representation of the relationships the learner should generate." (Saloman, 1979, pp. 73-74).
In Solomon's experiment and in my replications of his first stage in my own classes, roughly half the class is "visual." If that proportion holds true in the newspaper-reading population, then newspapers need to be much more visual in the presentation of stories. Newspaper photographers are now using the web for the elaboration of their work that just doesn't get play by editors who are word based and who have never read Hicks' essay. (Some still photographers are adding sound to their stories for web publication. See the work of Joe Weiss, for example).
Mapping is an unusual form of visual communication as far as journalism is concerned. On the one hand a map displays as much content as a photograph, a typographical element or an informational graphic. But it is also a superb way to analyze data in order to grasp the patterns of interest lying hidden in the data. John Tukey developed his stem and leaf pencil and paper process to help study a data set. His methods were really a way to visually grasp the patterns evident in a data set. Computer software programs were developed that allowed the user to "spin" or rotate a data cloud on the screen, enabling the perception of three-dimensional volume on a two-dimensional screen. This helps researchers visually grasp relationships between three variables in a data set that otherwise might be hidden in traditional number-crunching analysis methods.
Mapping software allows layering of data with geocoordinates to a map. Layers may be turned on and off at will. Numeric levels of the variable of interest may be easily discerned by using a graduated color scale. Maps, in an analysis context, allow journalists to quickly grasp the potential for story ideas. (Students are easily able to see these relationships as well. See Nichols' writing below.) Mapping is yet another method in the tool kit of computer-assisted reporting. Mapping is useful to journalists as a data analysis tool even if it is not necessary to publish the map.
I have often referred to CAR tools as a way to interview a data set much as a journalist would do an oral interview with a source. A data set pertinent to a story should be treated as another source for a story. A data set is a story waiting to be told. Excel, Access, SAS, and SPSS are all "interviewing" tools. But so is mapping software such as ArcView. If we assume half of all reporters learn better visually, then perhaps mapping software ought to be a standard analysis tool equal in importance to the spreadsheet or relational database.
In 1999, J.T. "Tom" Johnson took a leadership role in establishing a discussion list, JAGIS-L, for journalists learning about or using mapping. His list has been influential in helping journalists and educators learn about and solve journalistic problems with mapping.
There is no doubt that mapping has arrived as a developed practice in journalism. "The Associated Press Guide to Internet Research and Reporting," published in 2001, devotes Chapter Eight to mapping using ArcView as the example software. The Associated Press notes that ArcView, though expensive, is the program most often used by journalists and government agencies, the source of much of the data for journalistic stories.
As an administrator, it is clear to me that mapping needs to be in the journalism curriculum. But where and how should it be introduced? The journalism faculty at IUPUI do not take readily to advances in computer technology. Fortunately, my campus is at the edge of downtown Indianapolis, which gives me a rich pool of excellent practitioners to draw upon as adjunct professors. Indeed, the major technological innovations in our reporting classes have come from our adjuncts. Hank Nuwer, an adjunct, has developed an online version of our "Computer Methods for Journalists" course. That course fills instantly, indicating that it serves a need for commuting students. Mark Nichols, co-author for this article, has taught our advanced reporting classes for some years. Nichols is the computer-assisted reporting expert for The Indianapolis Star. He regularly uses mapping for his reporting at the Star either as an analysis tool or to actually put maps in the paper. Nichols and I began having talks about how to integrate mapping into the curriculum, partly encouraged by Tom Johnson's list messages popping into my mailbox on a regular basis. This past semester, we made our first effort described by Nichols below, which I believe was successful.
My challenge is to continue development of the module so that any of our adjuncts, or even the full-time faculty, will be able to incorporate mapping as a critical thinking analysis unit in other classes. Mapping should be an element in our "Computer Methods for Journalists" course. It should also be an element in our "Introduction to Visual Communication" course. Once exposed to the analysis method of mapping, students immediately see the utility for other courses (read the student quote in Nichols' writing below).
Because mapping is both a method of story presentation and a data analysis method, it has potential for broad inclusion in a journalism curriculum. Theory and Methodology courses should also expose students to mapping as one method of grasping the meaning of data.
We certainly are not the first journalism program to try mapping. Indeed, we have much to learn from those who have already moved beyond the basics. But our first simple start was successful. Nichols was wise to develop an exercise based on something about which the students had a personal interest.
I continue to be reinforced for using adjunct faculty to develop areas of the curriculum where full-time faculty have no expertise or interest. I urge other administrators to do the same. Mapping must find a place in the journalism school curriculum as a method to foster critical thinking about story ideas. Other disciplines are far ahead of us. It is time to catch up.
For much of the 20th century, journalists relied on human sources, paper documents, instinct, and a simple set of tools to land a story--a pen, a notebook, a telephone and a typewriter.
But as computers swept through newsrooms in the late 1970s, a new wave of "non-human" sources began to evolve: the Internet and electronic databases. The tools used to cultivate them changed as well--spreadsheets, database management software, and most recently, GIS.
As one journalist who's seen the changes and embraced them, I was eager to pass along my experiences with mapping databases to my advanced reporting and writing class at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. I figure that GIS will be more than just cutting-edge technology by the time these next-generation journalists hit the newsroom.
The challenge, however, was getting these computer-savvy students to understand how the technology can lead them to a story in which many could relate.
So I followed my reporter's instinct during one class meeting and asked how many had been a crime victim in recent years. Nearly half the students raised a hand. Then, I asked how many knew someone who had been a recent crime victim. Nearly everyone else raised a hand.
At that point, I knew that our most involved class assignment this semester would involve crime data.
During ongoing class discussions, we decided to look at neighborhoods around Indianapolis with the highest reported crime rates, and focus our reporting on why so much crime was occurring in these areas.
Our plan of attack allowed us to use ArcView in the classroom the way many professional journalists are using it today--to search for trends and patterns in data and to help locate potential sources in the lowest and highest areas.
Getting the data--reported crimes by address for the county that takes in Indianapolis--would have been the toughest task for the students. Marion County, Indiana, is patrolled by both city and county police agencies, and several smaller departments that operate within incorporated areas. Fortunately, I was able to use data I had collected for previous stories produced for the local newspaper.
After a week's worth of practice on ArcView and Microsoft Access, we were able to create a file with more than 50,000 reported violent and property crimes, join it to a mapping file, geocode the addresses and assign them to census tracts, and create vivid color-shaded maps showing areas with the highest and lowest crime rates per 1,000 residents.
The patterns of where the most crimes were occurring became clear almost as soon as we finished putting the last layer on the map. Census tracts that included shopping malls stuck out like drops of red ink on a white cloth.
With the discovery, though, the students learned a valuable lesson in how data can sometimes mislead. Most of the areas around shopping plazas, particularly our large downtown mega mall, contain few residents. Were high rates driven by a large number of crimes, or a low number of people living nearby?
In this case, most of the class decided a truer measurement of crime could be made in more residential areas. But they also thought the "crime at the mall" story angle was too good to pass up.
So we began exploring some tough questions: how is security at most malls? Do crimes differ at urban and suburban malls, and if so, why? Are certain types of merchants more vulnerable than others? Should shoppers feel safe?
Before long, we had enough fodder to do some enterprising reporting and writing--thanks to our initial work with ArcView.
As one student put it: "That was the most interesting class assignments I've had since I've been here. I can think of a million ways to use ArcView in my reporting and research in school. I hope I can use it again."
With the impact GIS is beginning to make in college classrooms and newsrooms across the nation, there's more than a good chance she will.
The Associated Press Guide to Internet Research and Reporting. Frank Bass. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing, 2001.
Eyes on the News. Pegie Stark and Mario Garcia (edited by Edward Miller). St. Petersburg, Florida: The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1991.
Interaction of Media, Cognition, and Learning. Gavriel Salomon. San Francisco, California: Josey-Bass, 1979.
When Nerds and Words Collide: Reflections on the Development of Computer Assisted Reporting. Editor Nora Paul. St. Petersburg, Florida: The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1999.
Words and Pictures. Wilson Hicks. New York, New York: Arno Press, 1973. (Originally published by Harper and Brothers, 1952.)