ABSTRACT
Journalists use spreadsheets daily, whether it is to pick out patterns of waste and abuse in government or to provide context with figures of information that show the years of data and trends. Using spreadsheets is a particularly attractive approach for journalists beginning to do computer-assisted reporting because it's easy to get data into a spreadsheet format. Eric Lipton, a young reporter at the time, was examining a generous early retirement plan for city employees. He was trying to calculate the percentage of each person’s pension as compared to his or her salary at the time of retirement. Experts told him the figure should be approximately 67 percent, but in the city’s early retirement plan some retirees’ pensions came close to the full amount of their former salary. Lipton was tediously tapping a calculator for each comparison when he remembered that he had seen a spreadsheet demonstration in which repetitive calculations were done much more rapidly.
