Development of Computer-Assisted Reporting, The

Computer-assisted news reporting refers to anything that uses computers to aid in the news-gathering process. The introduction of computers in the newsroom has been a gradually developing process that must be traced back to early computing devices. Later advances included inventions by John Napier, Blaise Pascal, and Charles Babbage. A breakthrough in computing was the invention of Herman Hollerith's Tabulator and Sorter. Soon after Howard Aiken developed the Mark I computer. By the 1950s, the computing revolution had begun. The first actual instance of computer-assisting reporting was with the 1952 presidential election when CBS employed the Remington Rand UNIVAC to predict the outcome of the race between Eisenhower and Stevenson. A decade later several pioneers such as Philip Meyer and Elliot Jaspin began to successfully initiate new computing techniques for reporting. Computer-assisted news reports by Clarence Jones, David Burnham, Don Barlett, and James Steele soon followed. By the 1980s microcomputers became commonplace and their introduction into newsrooms occurred in several stages: first, individual reporters bought their own computers; later, organizations purchased them; initially microcomputers were primarily used for word processing but one of the newer purposes was to connect to online databases. Computer-assisted reporting has recently found great success in newsrooms across the country, but it only came about because of the initiative of a few pioneers. For computer-assisted journalism to become so successful, it was necessary for basic reporting skills to already be in place.