ABSTRACT
The effect of the improvements in portable computing is much wider use in the corporate world, education, and in newsrooms. The potential for their use for Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) out of the newsroom expands each year as their capacities improve. Journalists frequently have to go far from the newsroom to cover their assignments. In political reporting, for example, success of reporters working on tight deadlines on the campaign trail often depends on the ability of reporters to master their high-tech tools. Only the largest of databases, those requiring mainframes, are out of the range of Portable CAR today. The ability to take a portable computer into a clerk’s office, a police department, or other government office to collect data has taken CAR to a new level. The national CAR study conducted at the University of Miami found that there are a surprising number of daily newspapers that still have no portable computing resources.
