James Brown
IT 559; IUPUI
(317) 278-5323
The Institute's central mission is to study and develop cutting-edge reporting techniques, particularly using computer technology, and to teach these techniques to professional journalists, students, and journalism educators. These techniques include identifying and searching online databases; acquiring electronic data from government and other agencies; creating personal databases for in-depth reporting projects; and selecting appropriate statistical techniques for analysis of data. Among the most important of the Institute's purposes: to publish articles, guides, and a newsletter on advanced reporting techniques, using a combination of "how I did it" from professionals and results of field testing by Institute staff; to monitor, evaluate, and exchange computer-assisted techniques used successfully by print and broadcast journalists in America's newsrooms; to consider the ethical problems that may emerge from increasing capacity to gather, store, and interpret information; to work with database and computer software developers and hardware manufacturers in creating and testing effective programs for educators and practitioners; and to target small- and medium-sized newspapers for special projects and field research in hope that it will nudge them into the computer age.
