By Phineas Fiske New Technology Committee 9/14/01

Something like this probably has happened recently to you: You read a story in the paper or hear one on TV that seems to beg for an editorial -- but it refers to a report or other research that the news account treats only cursorily. So you don't know how quite to address the issue, or even if the news really justifies the reaction that it initially inspired.

In the old days, before the Internet, that meant trying to track down a copy of the report from the organization or institution that issued it -- if you could find it, and find the right person. And then you had to wait until the report got to you before you could pursue the issue. Or at least you had to find other news accounts treating the same subject. Then maybe you had to track down somebody to provide perspective -- a recognized authority of some kind. Or maybe do a little further research through your news organization's library or the public library.

No more. The Internet has changed all that -- if you know how to use it. Here's how.

 

The Story Breaks: You see it on the nightly news or read it in the morning paper. The account may be sketchy about the source, as well as the details.

 

Step One: Track down the original story and additional news accounts. If the story is breaking, you could try the AP or Reuters, even if your paper doesn't subscribe to one or the other. For AP, http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/index.htm or for state wires, http://www.freepint.com/gary/newscenter.htm#State. For Reuters, http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ts/index.html. Or take a look at FACSNet (http://www.facsnet.org), the Web site of the Foundation for American Communications (which seeks to educate journalists about the intricacies of difficult topics); it includes an annotated version of the day's AP Digest, with links to related resources of various kinds.

If the story has been kicking around a while, you can search back a few days. Two major national papers maintain a week or two's worth of story archives that you can access for free: The New York Times, at http://search.nytimes.com/search/. The Washington Post, whose search facility also can check AP stories, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/searches/mainsrch.htm. If the news is happening at a distant city, go to its newspaper's on-line site: Most U.S. papers can be found through NewsLink, at http://newslink.org/, and some have free short-term archives.

Or try a news search engine, although it may pick up extraneous material as well: NewsIndex, at http://www.newsindex.com/. Or Northern Light, at http://www.northernlight.com/news.html. And RocketInfo has a demonstration news search engine at http://www.rocketnews.com/2corporate/searchengine.html.

My favorite, however, is Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com). Sign up for a free MyYahoo! account and you can set up a page that scans various news sources frequently during the day, and lists the top several headlines and links to current stories. Specify that you want Yahoo News Full Coverage (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/) among the news sources to include. Full Coverage not only scans both wire services, but when you click through to a story, it provides a wealth (well, a lot) of additional resources related to the event in question. Better yet, at the top of any Full Coverage item is a place to search for news about any topic, starting with today's stories and running back over several previous days, and including additional news sources as well as the wires.

And for even more focused searching, Yahoo! also has a news search site that allows the user to shape and limit the search in various ways, at http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/options?p=

Best yet, if you are using a Windows PC you can download from Yahoo! something called the Yahoo! Companion (http://companion.yahoo.com), which installs a new tool bar at the top of your Web browser that features prominantly a News Search window -- always handy and almost always capable of finding whatever news account you are researching.

Regrettably, Yahoo! has recently struck a deal with The New York Times to offer Times stories in its news search only for a fee -- although you may well find a current story at the Times' Web site for free. And for all of the supoorting material Yahoo! offers, it doesn't always meet the most important and most obvious need: A link to the news source or report that you are trying to track down. An often more reliable path to that is CNN News (http://www.cnn.com), whose editors seem as acutely attuned to the content of their news and the useful interactive opportunities as anyone.

But say you've tried all that to no avail. What next?

Step Two: Go directly to the source. Usually the issuers of newsworthy reports or studies want you to read it. Usually (although not always) the organization that issued the report is named in the initial news story. If you know it's name, you can probably find it in short order with what is still the best search engine on the World Wide Web, Google (http://www.google.com). (Incidentally, Google offers a free tool bar, like Yahoo!'s, to install on your Windows-based Internet Explorer browser that provides permanent, always-available search window. Fetch it from http://toolbar.google.com/.

Finding the source has another advantage: With its Web pages in front of you, you are in a better position to evaluate its reliability. If it is a government agency or appended to one, then its authoritativeness is established. If it is a recognized authority in its own right, ditto. But if it is a think tank or advocacy group, it probably has an agenda it wants to promote; poking around its Web site will likely reveal its political leanings, and help you evaluate the reliability of its efforts to get your attention.

(The reliability of stuff on the Web is famously uncertain, as anybody with a little training can create a Web page. For many searchers, that's a problem. For journalists, it's much less a worry: You most likely already know what the reliable sources are for the kind of information you seek. You also know not to expect just anybody who wanders in to provide you authoritative data. Same applies on the Web. There are a variety of guides for evaluating Web resources, mostly produced by college libraries to aid student or academic researchers. An example, from The Johns Hopkins University, is at http://www.library.jhu.edu/elp/useit/evaluate/index.html.

Even when you reach the right Web site, however, you may not stumble immediately on the document you are seeking. Some sites will feature the report of the day right out front, in flashing lights. But some don't. Where to turn then?

Many government or business sites feature a link to "News," stocked with current news releases; not infrequently, the release will include a link to the report or study it refers to.

Then again, large government bureaucracies in particular are often fragmented internally, by function. So a report attributed to, say, the U.S. Department of Justice may actually have been issued by, say, the Office of Justice Statistics, and may only be found by digging around a bit. Sometimes typing the key terms into the search box of the site is sufficient, and most major organization's now offer some kind of search facility. But you may have to dope out the hiding place yourself: If the report is on how many people are in prison in America , for example, you may have to check a couple or three subsections of the Justice Department site before you find the right one.

And sometimes reports are prepared for government agencies by separate academic research institutes; if one is mentioned in a news account of a government report, try looking for the information on its Web site.

Don't give up too soon: What you want is very likely there. Follow hunches; they often work when nothing else does.

Once you find the report, you may want to print it out. More and more organizations are producing their material in Adobe Acrobat format, which prints out more reliably than a Web page may. To read an Acrobat document, you need to have Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. Get it from Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html).

Incidentally, Google was the first search engine that was able to catalog Acrobat files, as well as everyday Web pages, and it likely is still the leader in such searches. But Google probably won't have the latest stuff catalogued soon enough for a news organization; it takes it a while to get around to viewing all the zillions of new pages added to the Internet weekly.

Step Three: Now you have the document you've been seeking. What do you make of it? You may need some perspective on the issue. Here are some places to look:

Government agencies: There are several bipartisan and respected sources of analysis in the federal government. For budgetary issues, the Congressional Budget Office (http://www.cbo.gov). For management issues, the General Accounting Office (http://www.gao.gov). CBO and GAO sites are both searchable. And for matters of broader scope, the Congressional Research Service, whose reports are accessible from two lawmakers' Web site, http://www.house.gov/shays/CRS/CRSProducts.htm or http://www.house.gov/markgreen/crs.htm, although you'll have to browse various categories of reports to see if there's one that meets your needs. (Two other CRS resources: The National Council for Science and the Environment has CRS reports back to 1990 bearing on its main interests; and the State Department has more recent reports on foreign policy issues.) When the federal government wants evaluations of a scientific, technical or medical issue, it often turns to the National Academies for a report; a vast array of them is available at the NA Web site, http://www.nas.edu/

Other approaches: Some think tanks and advocacy groups (the distinction is often blurred) are founts of information; some are more interested in making the public aware of their existence and world view than actually providing the research they may have performed. My two favorites, for the broad coverage and high quality of their work, and their intelligently centrist orientation, are the Brookings Institution (http://www.brookings.edu) and the Progressive Policy Institute (at http://www.ppionline.org, the research arm of the Democratic Leadership Council). The Urban Institute does solid research on a narrower range of social policy questions, available at http://www.urban.org/. Resources for the Future (http://www.rff.org/) researches environmental issues in a balanced, if sometimes technical, way.

But there are also umbrella Web sites that link to a variety of organizations of roughly similar political leanings, and that provide searches of their bank of studies and reports.For conservative views, try Townhall.com (http://www.townhall.com). For a liberal orientation, try Moving Ideas: An Electronic Policy Network (http://movingideas.org/). Several sites offer wholesale lists of think tanks and advocacy organizations, without any search capabilities. If you want to try your luck, Yahoo!'s list is at http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Political_Science/Public_Policy/Institutes/

And for a broader view, with a thumbnail sketch of various policy approaches to major issues and an emphasis on how the public view them, there's no better sources than Public Agenda (http://www.publicagenda.org). NationalIssues.com (http://www.nationalissues.com) has a mildly more rightward tilt. And FACSNet (http://www.facsnet.org) supplies a variety of resources and background material on a range of public issues.

Finally, if you need to consult a real expert, there are a couple of ways to track them down. FACSNet's annotated AP News Digest (http://www.facsnet.org) often includes references to scholars on the topic at issue, and FACS maintains a database of academic experts as well. And if you have more time, ProfNet (http://www.profnet.com) will issue requests for authorities to university and corporate public information officers; they often produce helpful results.

These are just a few of a multitude of resources on the Internet, ones that I have found most useful. But depending on your politics, your topics of interest, and your Internet eccentricities, other sites may serve you better. If you're new to the game, try some out. But when you find a useful one or several, stick with them. Often the more you use an Internet resource, the better you get at making it work for you.