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Tools to Dig Deeper panel: Internet Savvy and IngenuityBy Françoise Chanut Although the Internet has placed an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips, finding good data, storing it efficiently, and exploiting all its potential are daunting tasks. In "Tools to Dig Deeper," a popular session that was held both morning and afternoon, Tom Johnson, Phil Cohen and Griffin Palmer shared tips and anecdotes to help writers make the best use of Internet resources.
"Google is not the key to the kingdom," said Johnson, a journalism professor at San Francisco State University. For all its speed and breadth, the popular search engine surveys only 10% of the information available on the Web, he said. Journalists will dig up more if they diversify and sharpen their tools, Johnson said, giving practical tips in three key areas: browsers, bookmark and information managers, and news alerts. Look for reasonably high security and good bookmark management in a browser, Johnson said. "Anything is better than Internet Explorer," he said. Johnson favors Mozilla and its cousin FireFox, two products of the open-source software movement. Opera and Apple's Safari also rank high on his list. Different browsers offer various desirable features, like blocking pop-up ads, adding comments to a page, and navigating between open pages via window tabs. Save Explorer though, since some Web pages are incompatible with other browsers, he said. Good bookmark managers make it easy to organize, retrieve and annotate saved pages, Johnson said. Good options are available through freeware distributors such as www.tucows.com. Bookmarks can be stored on your own computer or on the Web -- a handy option that keeps them available at any computer. But Johnson saves bookmarks on his computer just in case, as Web-based managers can go out of business. Useful information management tools are available from NetSnippets, which lets users save pieces of Web pages, and SurfSaver, which saves a page along with linked pages. Alert tools deliver electronic mail on topics of interest on a regular basis or as news arises. Some tools are very specific (one called ChangeDetect signals Web site address changes); others survey a broad range of topics (PowerReporting, ResourceShelf). Writers may also join listservs, electronic mail services that circulate news on very specific subjects. Writers can find interesting listservs on university Web sites, or on the L-Soft and Tile sites. Newsgroups, hosted by Google or Yahoo, are a good source of breaking news. Phil Cohen, San Francisco bureau chief for New Scientist, shared some of the unexpected ways he has found sources for stories. "Scientists don't always want to talk to you, because they may have something to hide," said Cohen. That tickles Cohen's curiosity. Patents are among Cohen's favorite tools. Patents "tell you what people are eager to make money on," which is potential material for interesting stories, Cohen said. Moreover, because scientists file patents before they publish their results, finding a patent scoop gives the writer time to research a story before it is released to the public. When Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts company specializing in cloning, would not share with Cohen promising results because of an exclusive agreement with the New York Times, Cohen looked up the company's recent patent applications. That led him to the names of ACT collaborators, who did not know about the company's gag rule and filled him in. Cohen based his 1998 New Scientist article "Organs Without Donors" on what they told him. Cohen is also fond of government reports. The National Academy of Sciences, the Government Accounting Office and the reports of bioethics committees are all good sources of detail for interesting science stories. For instance, Cohen found the idea for his 1998 New Scientist feature "Is Dolly an Imposter?" -- about the world's first cloned sheep -- in a report from former President Clinton's cloning advisory committee. In the report, Cohen had discovered a skeptic who questioned whether Dolly had really been created by cloning. Finally, Cohen recommended closely reading corporate and institutional Web sites. He has created interesting stories out of discrepancies he discovered between a company's official announcement and the company's Web site. A lot of information is just sitting there that people don't know about, he concluded. For Griffin Palmer, database editor for the San Jose Mercury News, the Internet revolution means ready access to a wealth of raw data that reporters can analyze on their own. He remembers when public records were kept on mainframe computers. "Gaining access to them used to be a huge struggle," he said. Computer scientists at government agencies analyzed the data and handed reporters processed information they had no means to verify. Now reporters can access public records from their desktops. "We have the power to say 'Give us the data, let us crunch it ourselves,'" said Palmer. What's more, reporters can link data from several databases, and ask questions that government agencies might not be asking. Comparing death records with voter registration lists may show that dead people are actually voting -- the beginning of a story, he said. Palmer encouraged journalists to learn programming and statistics so they can carry out their own database analysis. Information and training opportunities are offered by The National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting. Structured query language is his tool of choice. Instead of gleaning data by clicking through a database, write an SQL script that will collect the information automatically, he suggested. Just think how many stories are buried within the Internet, just waiting for someone to dig deep enough. Additional information:
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