Студопедия

Главная страница Случайная страница

Разделы сайта

АвтомобилиАстрономияБиологияГеографияДом и садДругие языкиДругоеИнформатикаИсторияКультураЛитератураЛогикаМатематикаМедицинаМеталлургияМеханикаОбразованиеОхрана трудаПедагогикаПолитикаПравоПсихологияРелигияРиторикаСоциологияСпортСтроительствоТехнологияТуризмФизикаФилософияФинансыХимияЧерчениеЭкологияЭкономикаЭлектроника






Researching online






one day in 2006, I asked a journalism trainee to research the brown bear for a sidebar to a story we were running. one of the ‘facts’ she presented us with was that each bear eats 10, 000 moths a day. I asked her if this was likely, given that moths do not congregate, and that a bear would have to catch each one individually. Even if they could do this each day, would the food value in the average moth make this worthwhile? she looked at me as if I was mad. ‘But it was on the web, ’ she said. A discussion about how the Net was not entirely infallible ensued, during which she told me that Wikipedia was reliable since it was fact-checked by experts. ‘oh yeah? ’, I said, ‘what experts? And who pays for them? ’ My explanation that Wikipedia is a non-profit, open-source operation came as devastating news to her. As did, somewhat later, my discovery that the bear’s moth appetite related to an entire year, not one day. For the benefit of such trainees and journalists, here are the things I think every reporter should know about the Net:

Treat web pages like any other source

In other words, be suspicious. The Internet is not an opportunity that has been wasted on the unhinged, exhibitionist and boring. seeing credibility flaws in the websites of the slightly mad is not difficult. Nor is it hard to spot the hopelessly biased offerings from activists and single-issue obsessives. The problem comes with sites that look plausible, but which aren’t. You have to develop the radar to detect these, asking all the usual questions when approaching any source (Who is behind this? Why are

REsEARCH 57

they putting this out? What’s included? What’s left out?). My alarm bells ring whenever I come across: no highly visible date for the material presented; the need for excessive page-turning; and a site whose contact details contain no postal address, or phone number.

Be as specific in your searches as you can

You can search not just for words but for phrases; and putting double quote marks around them will ensure that the search engine delivers only the instances where those words occur together in that order. For instance, put East Timor militia into Google and you get 477, 000 results. But put quote marks around those words and you only have 584 matches. You can combine phrases in a search, so if you add ‘+ “in 1996’’’, the results are further narrowed to 53. You can subtract words and phrases as well. Thus, if you wanted to find out about President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Tony Blair, you might search for: ‘Clinton’ + ‘Tony Blair’. This gets you 4.47 million results. But, the most detailed material is likely to have been written before Clinton left the White House. so make your search: ‘Clinton’ + ‘Tony Blair’ – George W Bush and immediately more than four million sites are eliminated.

Treat searches like a brain-teaser

When using a search engine, you are pitting your wits against a database with billions of entries. The smart researcher finds words or phrases that give them a manageable number of matches – not every site that has ever glancingly dealt with the subject in question. Thus, if you want to know about the life of, say, some dead politician, it is far better to search for ‘name’ + ‘obituary’ (or ‘biography’) than just the name. Better still, try and think of phrases that would be used in the kind of material you are seeking. In the case of an obituary, that would be something like ‘he was born in’ or ‘he is survived by’. Good online guides to searching are: searchenginewatch.com or researchbuzz.org.

Use the advanced search facility

Whatever your favourite search engine, there will be a link on its home page that will lead you to the advanced search facility. This enables you to refine your search by date and other parameters.

Use the cached version

sometimes, when checking pages produced by a search engine, you find the site no longer contains the material you were after. This is because the page in question has since been updated and your material archived

58 THE uNIvERsAL JouRNALIsT

or deleted. The answer is to click on the ‘cached’ version of the page. This is the page the search engine logged, and therefore will contain the information you searched for. Cached pages (a link to which you will find next to the url under the page title on Google) have another advantage. The terms you searched for are colour-coded, so, in a long page of close type, the needle you searched for will stand out in the haystack.

Consider subscribing to an online archive

These are pretty comprehensive libraries of articles, academic journals and books, and are immensely worthwhile if you write lengthy magazine stories or books. ones I have subscribed to when researching books are eLibrary, and Questia. The latter is the world’s largest and has an enormous number of books you can download and search. There are also newspaper archives like that of the New York Times, which has a database of all articles going back to 1851. You can buy articles individually or in bulk.

Be aware of the limits of search engines

search engines can’t penetrate beyond the front or search pages of databases. since a lot of good content (like newspaper or magazine articles) are archived in a database, anything other than the most recent cannot be found via a search engine. A very good guide to these more recessive parts of the Net is The Deep Web, run by the university At Albany, New York.

Use online tutorials

Turn yourself from a basic Internet user into a relatively expert one by spending some time with one of the online guides to searching and using the Net. A good starter one is internettutorials.net. If you prefer books, the best is The Net for Journalists by Martin Huckerby, (published by uNEsCo), which comes complete with a CD.

Newsgroups

These are the forums on the Internet, open to anyone. There are more than 17, 000 of them, covering everything from classical music to previously unknown species of pornography. Many are frivolous but there are more serious newsgroups than you might imagine. some, like alt.disasters.aviation, are occupied by conspiracy theorists, but there are enough groups with informative, sensible postings to make regular visits worthwhile. Many newsgroups are regularly used by academics and others with serious credentials. Generally, specialised newsgroups

REsEARCH 59

are more likely to have useful postings. overall, it is worth half an hour of any journalists’ time to download the full list of groups supplied by your IsP and go through it, noting any which cover your interests.

Newsgroup postings can give you: a general feel for the current issues in an area; potential stories (particularly contributions from qualified experts); and, since posters leave behind an email address, potential sources, to whom you can send questions or a request to talk.

An archive of newsgroup postings can be found by searching Google Groups.

Blogs

These range from online diaries (most commonly the ramblings of cranks, obsessives and bores), or daily logs of web links of interest (the most useful to journalists), to serious articles by professional (or non-professional) journalists. There are enormous numbers of them. As Guy Chapman wrote on a BBC website: ‘The great thing about blogs is that anyone can set one up. The only problem is that anyone can set one up.’

Most numerous (but with the highest drop-out rate) are personal journals of the ‘Dear diary’ variety. These can chart experiences at work (earning some of their writers the sack), everyday emotions, trips, parenting, and living with an illness or a crisis. A few are newsworthy, like saveKaryn.com, which recorded a New York woman’s battle with credit card debt – and raised, via donations, the cash to clear it. others contain writing of a more sustained fictional or autobiographical kind, and a few of them begun in lone hope have ended in a publisher’s contract, among them: ‘Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq’, ‘straight up & Dirty’, memoirs of a divorcee in New York, and ‘Girl With a one-Track Mind’, the sexual experiences of a thirtysomething single woman in London. Then there are those which have political or religious axes to grind, whose collective, if generally unco-ordinated, highlighting of writings they dislike can constitute a raucous lobby.

More directly useful to the researching reporter are links blogs that direct, with or without comments, readers to sites deemed interesting. Metafilter is a classic example, and I doubt a week goes by without me finding on it an idea for a news story or feature. There are also single subject blogs, which track news and developments within that field. some, especially in technical areas, now attract enough audience to be courted (or quietly sponsored) by manufacturers, others are journalism by another name, and specialist ones have exposed product faults or stories that mainstream journalism has failed to spot. Bloggers also seem to examine source material in more detail than print journalists, and can research the Internet with more skill than 999 out of a 1, 000 print reporters.

60 THE uNIvERsAL JouRNALIsT






© 2023 :: MyLektsii.ru :: Мои Лекции
Все материалы представленные на сайте исключительно с целью ознакомления читателями и не преследуют коммерческих целей или нарушение авторских прав.
Копирование текстов разрешено только с указанием индексируемой ссылки на источник.