NOTE: I'll be taking a break next week in order to finish the web pages for my book which is due out in August. The book, Net Effects: How Librarians Can Manage the Unintended Consequences of the Internet, will be available from Information Today, http://books.infotoday.com/books/NetEffects.shtml, 1-57387-171-0, $39.50. You can get some sense of the book from the outline for my presentation at the Information Today conference, http://marylaine.com/IT2003.html
If any of you would like autographed copies, I can do the next best thing: send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and tell me what message you would like, and I will mail you an autographed insert you can paste into the book. My address is on my resume page, http://marylaine.com/resume.html
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GREAT JOURNALISM SITES -- AND WHY LIBRARIANS SHOULD CARE
by Marylaine Block
I love journalism web sites, and not just because I'm a journalist and writer myself. I love them because, like librarians, journalists have to be prepared to become experts at a moment's notice on almost any topic, some of which have large existing bodies of knowledge, and some of which come out of nowhere, like SARS. Naturally, they build themselves libraries of trustworthy web-based, print, and human resources.
AP has put together a Monday-Friday resource called the FACSNET Daily News Briefing, http://www.facsnet.org/issues/apd/aptoday.php3. It takes what it considers to be the four biggest stories and for each of them supplies Newslinks, Backgrounders, interviewable News Sources, and Internet Resources, which are often links to the full texts of official documents.
For example, on Wednesday, July 16, for the story "Greenspan Could Cut Rates Again," FACSNET pointed to stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, a FACSNET Backgrounder called "Why Do Financial Markets Listen to Alan Greenspan?", and contact information for two professors, one who teaches political economy at Harvard, and one who teaches banking and finance at Columbia. The Internet Resource recommended is the full text of Greenspan's congressional testimony. [I've written an extended article about FACSNET for the July-August issue of CyberSkeptic's Guide to the Internet.]
Probably the best over-all research tool is The Journalists' Toolbox, http://www.journaliststoolbox.com/, a directory of more than 20,000 Web resources. You can do a keyword search, or browse topics such as business research, crime, expert sources, listservs, public records, Form 990s (charities' tax filings), state government, teaching tools, etc. The selections are well-chosen and helpfully annotated.
Power Reporting, http://www.powerreporting.com/, is a similar kind of source. In partnership with the Columbia Journalism Review, it offers "Thousands of free research tools for journalists," arranged by beats, as well as finding tools for companies, nonprofits, people, media, government, and journalism. "Alerts for Journalists" is well worth checking out: it lists e-mail alerting services by subject. The site also includes a list of its Top 100 Web Sites, and a tutorial on web searching. All of these would be useful in an information literacy class, and for that matter could help us improve our own skills: check out its Newsroom Treasure Hunt and see how well you do.
CyberJournalist.net, http://www.cyberjournalist.net/, from the Media Center of the American Press Institute, combines a blog (links to useful web sites, articles, interviews, upcoming conferences, and such), with a Great Work Gallery, Tips & Tools, and a terrific Resource List.
The Great Work Gallery illustrates how photos, documents, maps, audio and video combine with traditional journalistic texts to illuminate both subject and readers; anyone who wants to do online storytelling will learn a lot here. Among the great works are a documentary on the life of Strom Thurmond, an interactive guide to the Tour de France, and panoramic photos of Iraq.
The Tips & Tools section includes links to such things as "Finding John Doe" (a backgrounder on public records searching), an Affirmative Action backgrounder, "How To Avoid Misquoting Google," "Tracking Iraq's Historic Treasures," and "A High Tech Way of Estimating Crowd Sizes" (weren't you always just a bit suspicious of those numbers in news reports?). Anybody who teaches information literacy should take a look at the Cyber Slip-Ups section, which has good tips on how to verify information, and plenty of funny stories about embarrassing goofs by reporters who should have known you can't believe everything you read on the internet.
The JournoList, http://www.journolist.com/, is a British-based site that takes a different tack: It asks what kind of answers journalists are looking for, and for each kind, tells them what kind of tool they need to use, and links them to a set of such resources.
Reporters also share our commitment to the Bill of Rights -- well, most of them, anyway. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, http://www.rcfp.org/, tracks the latest intrusions on our freedom be federal, state and local governments. It also supplies a state by state guide to open meetings and open records laws, a First Amendment Handbook, a report on electronic access to court records, and the RCFP's amicus briefs, public comments, and other documents.
These sites, incidentally, gratefully acknowledge the work internet librarians have done, linking to Gary Price and the Librarians' Index to the Internet and other key librarian contributions. It's time for us to return the favor and get to know these wonderful journalism sites -- and all the others they will steer us to.
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COOL QUOTE:
[Ex-Libris]
Saturday, July 19, 2003
