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Internet Searching Strategies for Journalists

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a worldwide collection of computer networks, cooperating with each other to

exchange data using a common software standard (http,ftp etc). Through telephone wires and

satellite links, Internet users can share information in a variety of forms. The size, scope and

design of the Internet allows users to:

connect easily through ordinary personal computers and local phone numbers;

exchange electronic mail (E-mail) with friends and colleagues with accounts on the

Internet;

post information for others to access, and update it frequently;

access multimedia information that includes sound, photographic images and even video;

and

access diverse perspectives from around the world.

http://www.centerspan.org/tutorial/net.htm

The internet has had a marked influence on journalism practice in many ways. It is both a big

platform for sourcing information, publishing and disseminating it.

Flat Earth News: Reporters can enliven their reports with diverse sources and data and

avoid flat news. http://www.humedia.nl/profiles/blogs/nick-davies-over website book

http://www.flatearthnews.net/

Copy/paste journalism; no checking…can be avoided since the internet provides massive

data bases to cross check most of the things we report about.

See Nick Davies interview

The internet offers new possibilities especailly multimedia reporting and visualisation.

Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/data

Concept of continuum reporting---pro-active reporting vs re-active reporting

See Internet history, foundation and background – at Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

Journalists need the Internet

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Since the primary job of journalists is to find information and package it for audiences, it is

important for journalists to learn how to utilize the internet as key resource for better stories. A

lot of information is available online, provided by media houses, journalists, governments, civil

society organizations etc. The best way to find out what information is available is to search the

internet.

Whether you are covering a story, writing a feature, editing someone's copy or doing background

research, the Internet can provide masses of detailed background. It will also help you find new

ideas and new contacts, if you know where to look. But few journalists have been trained in how

to work online. This training is aimed at offering journalists the basics of utlising the internet for

better reporting.

How to find out more about a story using the internet

Remember the Internet presents:

More sources –search names, officials or experts, including particular data

Has a wider geographical range (world wide web)

Direct access (the time you want the info you search and get it from

anywhere you are with an internet connection-as opposed to a library)

Multi media: you can search for audio/video/graphics, maps to help add

more info and life to your story

By now, many of you know that you can easily search for what you want in Google, the leading

search engine .You put your search term in the search box and hit search and you will get many

results from which to choose the most relevant.

But remember that Google indexes about 10 billion pages but that is 20% of the information on

the web

Databases provide more data but are not accessed easily by search engines

How do you find databases?

Utilise Institutional approach for searching

For human rights stories as an example, the UN, Human Rights

Watch, CIA facthandbook, etc these organizations keep compiling

on HR issues. Go to their websites and search for the information

you want. If you are looking for Economic growth or gender

disaggregated data, the World Bank, the International Finance

Corporation and the UN are additional sources of wide ranging

data. There are also government or CSO led efforts to provide

relevant data, like www.data.ug www.ubos.go.ug in the case of

Uganda.

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Find leading media:, BBC, Economist, newvision.co.ug, and subscribe to RSS feed

Search news site (newspaper) archives: on their website search. Every worthy website

has a search box which you can use to search that very site.

Search the web with Google

Important tips for web search

The trick to efficient web searches is to choose your search keywords and phrases with

enough precision to exclude the masses of results that are irrelevant to what you are

interested in.

· Set your preferences to return the maximum results

The Google page has a link marked ‘preferences’. This allows you to set some search

preferences (to search only English language pages, for instance) but the most useful

preference to change is the number of results shown for each search. The default setting

is for 10 results which means you have to refresh the page each time to get the next ten.

Set preferences for the maximum 100 results – which allows you to scan much bigger

chunks of data to see if it is relevant.

Keywords provide a simple way of narrowing down your focus, but, often, keywords

alone are not enough. Say you are looking for John Smith. Simply typing in John and

Smith in the search bar is going to give you every document where both of those names

appear: hundreds of thousands of documents. To avoid drowning, you will need to find

relatively unique features that identify the John Smith you are looking for.

· Use quotation marks

“John Smith” will return only those results where the words appear together. If you have

a middle name you can add that, for example: “John Sylvester Smith”

You can combine options using the OR command written in capitals, which Google uses

to distinguish from the word ‘or’. “John Sylvester Smith” OR “John S Smith” OR “JS

Smith”

· Add facts that you know or suspect

Say the John Smith you are interested in is alleged to be involved in drug smuggling and

operates out of Zurich. You would add to your search bar: “John Smith” Zurich or

perhaps “John Smith” Zurich drugs Which would return only pages where all those

words occur.

· Country-specific searches

You may not be certain that Smith operates out of Zurich, but you are sure he is based in

Switzerland. Using the “site:” command, Google allows you to search only pages with a

specific country domain designation. The Swiss domain designation is “.ch” while

Uganda is “.ug” So you might type in the search bar: “John Smith” site:.ch which would

return all Swiss pages containing the name John Smith; or “John Smith” drugs site:.ch

The domain designation for South Africa is .za, for Britain .uk Not sure of the country

designation? Google: “domain by country”

· Organisation-specific searches

Many commercial websites end with .com; many NGO’s, developmental organisations’

sites and activist groups end with .org. So if you are researching wind turbines, and want

the companies, you might use “wind turbines site: .com”. If you want to find criticism

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about wind turbines, you might use “wind turbines site:.org”. If you want data on activist

groups in Uganda, you type “wind turbines site: .or.ug”.

· Use the net to find sources

Drug smuggler John Smith may never have appeared on the net in that context (as an

accused drug smuggler) so the next best thing is to find an expert on the drug trade in

Switzerland who might have heard of John Smith and be able to give you more

information. “drug smuggling in Switzerland” or “drug smuggling” site:.ch should give

you access to newspaper or academic articles giving the names of such experts. You can

then google their names to find their telephone numbers or email addresses and make

contact.

· Using Google cache

Web pages change or are shut down. You may get a result on Google and find the page

has gone. Then click on the “cached” link on the specific result. Google saves a copy of

the pages that it catalogues as it searches the web, and that is the cache version: the

snapshot of the page as it was when Google’s computer looked at it. That copy is often

still available long after the original page has disappeared from the net. This is very

useful for tracking companies and individuals who have ‘disappeared’: they often still

exist in caches

· Use the internet’s phonebook

Nearly every country has an extensive telephone database, usually under the term “white

pages” (even many non-Englishspeaking countries list “white pages” of their phone

directories in English). So, for example, to try to look up John Smith’s Swiss number,

you would Google “white pages” site:.ch and find the sites that offer Swiss telephone

directories. Generally, directories require that you specify at least the town/city as well as

the name. This might not be as useful for Uganda until such a directory is put online.

· Download long articles for later reading

If you have limited opportunity to go online, then save pages that look useful for

background research so you can go through them carefully later.

· Build up your own database in a structured searchable way

When you save documents from the internet, or save transcripts of interviews or notes,

do so in a way which will allow you to find information again easily, or your virtual

desktop will end up like many journalists’ actual desks: a vast, widely spread pile of

assorted data where it is difficult to find anything at all, let alone quickly. There is a great

free internet tool, called ‘Google Desktop’, that searches and lists your computer files for

you. Simply key in ‘John Smith’ and the tool will give you a list of all the files you have

saved, even many years back under you can’t remember what name, with ‘John Smith’ in

it.

Don't discount little words

Google-users frequently think words like "a" and "the" are inconsequential in search

queries. Not so, says Russell. For example, typing "Who" into Google yields the primary

result of WHO: World Health Organization. Adding the article "a" gives you results for

the movie Horton Hears a Who!, and replacing "a" with "the" provides links related to the

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band The Who. "Little words that you'd normally think of as stop words or words that

might be extra turn out to make a big difference," Russell says.

Avoid using characters

Most characters, including the symbols for "paragraph," "euro" and "section" (¶, € and §),

do not register in Google searches. A search for "© 2010," is actually just a search for

"2010," Russell says. But there are some exceptions, which include C++, #hashtag and

Google+. C++ is treated as a single symbol because it's a commonly used programming

language. Russell adds that any search containing a word that precedes a "+" is

automatically searched in Google+.

Be aware of word order

Word order matters for Google searchers. In some cases, it makes little difference. But in

others, Russell says, switching the order returns completely different results. For

example, the search for "black and white" provides results related to the video game

Black & White. But a search for "white and black" displays the web page for the retail

company White House Black Market as the initial result. "When you're trying to

formulate a query, think about not only what words to include, but the order in which

they naturally come," Russell says.

Be specific with spaces

All it takes is one space to significantly modify a search. For example, one symbol that

Google acknowledges in searches is the minus sign, or the dash (-). This can be used to

narrow your query by subtracting specific search terms. "Recipe -tomatoes" will provide

recipes that don't include tomatoes. Correct spacing is crucial. There must be a space

between the first word and the dash, and no space between the dash and the following

word. Because of this, people using the dash sign to signify a range could unintentionally

narrow their search. "Pre -post renaissance art" will remove "post" from all text results,

but "pre-post renaissance art" will include pre- and post-renaissance art results.

Look different source type: doc, xls, ppt

Use Google news and create RSS feeds

Find institutions and their databases

Bloggers: using technorati –a search tool for blogs

Use Twitter (direct term search or using hastags

Tools for handling data from databases

Spreadsheet; excel

Database; access

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Mapping GIS

There are several tools to help u

Calculations: averages

Graphs: bar, line, pie

Maps:

Interactive graphs

UNDP data by gapminder

Statplanet http://www.sacmeq.org/statplanet/StatPlanet.html

Remember:

In journalism:

Graphs are analysis not illustrations

Cooperation between programmers, design and journalists important

Aim at better journalism; better storytelling, informing public

What do you need?

knowledge about statistics

How to handle spreadsheets, graphs, maps

Interactivity using flash or other visualization softwares e.g google

Create your own data

Do an online survey

Using survey monkey

Using google forms

Maps: google fusion tables

Verify the sources of the results before you just copy the

Look closely at the url to ensure it is genuine

Read the about and or contact page to see whether site is dependable

Do a whois.com search to determine who owns the site

Stephen C. Miller, an assistant to the technology editor at The New York Times, in 1997 came

up with a strategy for evaluating Internet information. The Freedom Forum Online initially

posted his strategy for handy reference. Despite the proliferation in 2001 and 2002 of new Web

address endings (including .biz, .info and .name), Miller's guide is still helpful as a starting point

in thinking about the usefulness of specific types of Web pages.

To sum up his strategy:

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government Web sites have the most reliable info in the United States (All U.S. federal

government Web domain names end in .gov, along with some state sites; all U.S. military

sites end in .mil.

university studies—especially peer-reviewed ones--are the next most reliable. (University

Web sites end in .edu. But be careful! Students post Web sites with .edu endings, too,

because universities give them free server space. A tip-off of such a personal Web page

posting is the tilda ~ in the URL.)

Special-interest groups, many which post pages ending in .org, often post good

information. But remember: The groups are biased. They have an agenda. And remember

that although .org URLs were intended for nonprofits, commercial companies or

individuals can buy sites ending in .org, too.

Other types of pages should be eyed with a reporter's caution. This goes for commercial

sites ending in .com, .net and now .biz, and any personal home pages (such as those now

ending in .name). However, most U.S. news sites end in .com, and their Web information

is generally as reliable as that published in their more traditional print or broadcast sister

publications.

When evaluating Web pages, check to see:

Who’s authoring and publishing them. Is the publisher a scholar on that topic--or

someone simply putting forth opinions with no substantiation?

If the writer unbiased, or someone with an agenda?

If the writer list a bibliography or source or Web links list, so you can do further

research on your own, or independently verify information?

When the site was last updated. A credible site should tell you this on the home

page. Currency is important!

Credible sites should also prominently list a contact phone number and/or e-mail address. If

they don't, be suspicious of the information. If they do, call or e-mail the listed contacts to verify

the information or to ask additional questions, just as you would when reporting for print or

broadcast outlets.

If there is no apparent contact info, click on the ending of the Web address area in your

browser, and backspace and delete up to the domain address—the address before the first

single slash. Often, this will give you the home page for the site and will tell you who created

the site.

If neither of these tactics works, try a Web look-up service. Initially, most commercial publishers

in the United States had to register with Network Solutions and pay a small fee to buy a .com,

.net or .org location on the Internet. Viewers could go

to:http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois, and type in a domain name, such

as www.washingtonpost.com, to find out information about that site--including key contacts, a

mailing address and when the Web site address was purchased.

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Today, numerous domain name service providers are providing registration services.Better-

Who-Is.com lets you search all the new registration services for information on site authors, as

does InterNIC.

InterNIC lists the service providers in a directory, athttp://www.internic.net/regist.html, and

lets you search for information on itsWhoIs service, at http://www.internic.net/whois.html. It

also lists the internationaltwo-letter codes for other countries, as does DomainSearch.com.

Remember to look at all information on the Internet with a critical eye, just as you would

when evaluating information handed to you anonymously!

Visualise your data

Gapminder

Manyeyes IBM

Article: memeburn

http://memeburn.com/2010/08/google-puts-scientific-tools-in-the-hands-of-journalists/

Show guardian: data

http://www.guardian.co.uk/data

Advanced search…You need advanced search capabilities to search some specifics

Population of uganda

Number of cell phone subscriptions

Worldbank statistics

Wolfram alpha

Google public data

Search engines

www.google.com

The master of all search engines, in my book, an added bonus is "Google takes a snapshot of

each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page

is unavailable. If you click on the 'Cached' link, you will see the web page as it looked when we

indexed it."

www.dogpile.com

"With Dogpile metasearch, you have access to not just one search engine, but many of the Web's

most popular search tools, including: Web search: Ah-ha, AltaVista, Direct Hit, Dogpile Web

Catalog, ePilot, FindWhat, GoTo.com, Kanoodle, LookSmart, Open Directory, RealNames,

SearchHippo, Sprinks by About, ValleyAlley and Yahoo!" Owned by Infospace.

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www.metacrawler.com

"MetaCrawler queries many of the Web's top search engines simultaneously … ranking them by

relevance. MetaCrawler draws upon the databases of a large number of the Web's best search

engines. MetaCrawler simultaneously sends queries to AltaVista, DirectHit Excite, FindWhat,

GoTo, and LookSmart, among others." Owned by Infospace, too.

www.rocketnews.com

This engine finds current news from all around the Internet. It automatically searches major

online national and city newspapers, newswires, magazines, trade publications, and press

releases.

www.altavista.com

"AltaVista checks the words you enter against a massive (half-million entry) phrase dictionary to

determine which words go together naturally, and automatically treats them as phrases."

www.lycos.com

Lycos.com "offers Internet users a fast, easy and efficient way to make sense of the Internet and

manage its vast resources. It combines leading Web search and navigation resources, deep

content in vertical areas, communications and personalization tools, and a complete shopping

center."

Reporting tools

Reporter’s Desktop

www.reporter.org/desktop

Search engines are grouped together here, along with explanations of how to use each best. Duff

Wilson also provides easy access to mapping, people, phone and e-mail searches, some of the

better reference sites.

News & Observer’s NeRD on the Road

metalab.unc.edu/slanews/intranets/nerdroad

The (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer's intranet site for their reporters use.

Journalist’s Guide to the Internet

reporter.umd.edu

Christopher Callahan is associate dean of journalism at the University of Maryland at College

Park and author of "A Journalist's Guide to the Internet" This is his site.

Bill Dedman’s Power Reporting

Resources for Journalists

www.powerreporting.com

Thousands of free research tools, the father of computer-assisted reporting boasts, and no ads.

This one gets a star. Check out GuideStar under Nonprofits; and Treasure Hunt under Training.

Who am I kidding? Check it all out.

The Journalist's Toolbox

www.journaliststoolbox.com/

"The Journalist's Toolbox started in 1996 as a page linked off of one of Mike Reilley's

Newswriting class syllabi at Northwestern University. Over the years, Reilley and his students

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kept adding links to the one-page site. Then professors from other universities shared links. Then

working professionals ... You get the idea."

Finding Almost Anybody

www.nreisner.com

A wealth of handy tips and links to finding virtually anyone on the planet, past or present.

MapTech

www.maptech.com/

"The largest online mapping resource for topographic maps and charts for land, sea, and air.

Browse, view, print, and email the maps for free. "

EmbassyWorld

www.embassyworld.com/maps//

Claims to offer every online map to every country in the world. You be the judge. Note: the main

site (www.embassyworld.com)is a directory for every embassy and consulate.

Acronym Finder

www.acronymfinder.com/

"The web's most comprehensive database of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. 212,000+

definitions!"

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.

www.bartleby.com/141/index.html

The grammer guru online. "It gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English

style and concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most

commonly violated."

SearchSystems.net

www.searchsystems.net/

Sreenath Sreenivasan, Columbia University journalism professor: "A good way to find public

information online is by using this service from Pacific Information Systems. With links to

almost 5,000 public records databases, it's the largest free collection of public records databases

on the Web."

Computer-Assisted Reporting

www.ire.org/datalibrary/databases/index.html

How about a library of online databases? Gold.

Libraryspot.com

www.libraryspot.com/

A free virtual library resource center for educators and students, librarians and their patrons,

families, businesses and just about anyone exploring the Web for valuable research information.

The Quotations Page

www.quotationspage.com/

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Search for quotes by keyword. This is fun for birthday cards, co-worker pick-me-ups or to track

down that elusive quote. I would double-check once you've found what you want, as the

accuracy varies. ###