The L.A. Times' first computer-assisted graphic

I finally found it. The first computer-assisted data journalism to run in the Los Angeles Times.

The Sunday July 29, 1984 paper featured Richard O'Reilly's smog chart of air conditions for the Olympic games, which opened in LA the day before.

Here it is.

Dick says:

I downloaded the data from the AQMD's dial-up data feed and fed the numbers into a BASIC program which fed the plot values into an HP Pen plotter.

The plots were printed onto acetate, which was overlaid in the composing room onto page proofs that already had the labels and grid lines that were constants.

After the Olympics, the editors liked the smog feature enough to make it a permanent feature, putting it at the bottom of the weather page, giving up an advertising strip across the bottom to do so.

Dick says he analyzed the data on a Compaq "Portable" personal computer, which came with a handle and weighed nearly 30 pounds.

Dick says his son, then a high school student, helped write that first BASIC program to analyze smog data. He later learned SAS, which he used for the rest of his programming career.

The success of the Olympics project led to the creation of the Los Angeles Times' first computer-assisted reporting team.

Dick was happy that allowed him to hire "a real programmer." His first partner was Maurine Lyons. When she left, he was joined by Sandra Poindexter from RAND.

Sandy continued to work at the Los Angeles Times until last year, when she retired.