| Finding Great Stories Online |
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Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute tells journalists to wake up and
discover the Internet, a fabulous tool for finding everything from
public records to active hate groups in the United States.
Finding Great Stories Online St. Petersburg, Fla. Sept. 18 -- When it comes to online research, most of us are asleep at the mouse. Sure, reporters and editors have formed an umbilical-like bond with the Internet, and most of us are on a first-name basis with our tried and true sites. But what most of us know, said Al Tompkins, leader of the Poynter Institute's Online Group, doesn't even scratch the surface. Tompkins, who updates Al's Morning Meeting on the Poynter Web site (www.poynter.org) offers several story ideas daily based on what he finds on the hundreds of Web sites he scours regularly and said there's no reason why most editors and reporters couldn't do the same. But first, we have to know where to look. "If all I ever did was read newspapers and watch TV, I'd think there's only two things online: Porn and spam," he declared. "But I'm gonna show you my best fishin' holes." Of course, most journalists know there's more - much more - to the Web than what we're already familiar with, but it's not always clear how to make the best of tools we have and the generally venture into the large, gaping black hole that is the virtual world hoping to return with something we can use. Take, for example, the humble search engine. "How many of you use Google?" asked Tompkins. "Okay good, but you probably only use it for one thing." He took the crowd of approximately two-dozen attendees through the image and news alert options and offered examples of how to find self-updating (every few seconds!) news sites. But that was small potatoes. What came next brought gasps of delight and collective chants of "Hey Al, that's cool," which Tompkins insisted be used whenever the crowd was impressed. First on the Tompkins Online Tour of Wow was www.archive.org/, which carries the Way Back Machine, a site that keeps snapshots of Websites by date. So, if you want to check to see which stories CNN.com covered on May 3, 2001, you'd enter CNN.com into the archive search engine and bang, you'll get three years worth of CNN.com snapshots. This, said Tompkins, is a great way to hold politicians accountable for what they said last week, last month or last year. By the time he introduced the room to www.searchsystems.net, editors and reporters alike were swooning at the comprehensive, state-by-state, county-to-county public records, the access to free sites and the hours saved not waiting for PR people to call back. Kathie Kerr, director of communications for Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City, Mo., looked at Tompkins as though he'd just parted the Red Sea (of data). "I think it's just amazing that it's so easy to find so much information about someone," said Kerr. “I can't wait to go back and use this." But, Tompkins warned that online sourcing for story ideas and data is only a starting point. "The things that you find online are not answers, they're clues to answers so don't let that stop you from picking up the phone, don't stop your reporting." Among Tompkins's top sites:
D. Parvaz is a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter and a 2003 fellow. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it . |