Today, it is difficult to imagine an Indian newsroom without computers, but this was not the case twenty years ago. It was in 1987, when I was a sub-editor with the Calcutta edition of The Economic Times, that I saw a few computers. They were Apple Macintosh desktops, commonly called ‘Macs’ now, and caused a great deal of excitement and bewilderment in our newsroom. Those days, even in places where computers had made an appearance, they were not connected to the internet as India was only taking its first tentative step towards the internet age. Newsroom computers were used mainly for writing and editing copy, and for preparing graphics.

The larger media houses, such as The Hindu, The Times of India, The Indian Express and the Hindustan Times, were the early adopters of this technology, and many smaller organisations went on with their old typewriters and ballpoint pens well into the 1990s. It goes without saying that the Indian media have come a very long way since then, and computers in today's newsrooms are extensively used not only for writing, copy-editing and graphics but also for performing the more complex tasks, which form the core of journalistic work.

These applications can be divided into two broad categories, namely, computers and the net as journalistic tools, and the net as a medium of mass communication. This chapter deals with the former through an account of the methods and consequences of what has come to be known as computer assisted reporting (CAR), and sometimes as computer assisted journalism (CAJ).