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By Danielle Kirsh
There are many Google tricks and methods that can make research much easier. Daniel Russell studies the way people search using Google. He offered a few tips for people who want to get the most out of their Google searches.
Search by image is a tool that allows you to search using a picture. Google will process that image and give you image results similar to your query. However, sometimes a picture is too ambiguous. To get more accurate results in an image search you have to include key terms along with the image. Other times, the photo might be too large. If this is the case, the photo can be cropped down to a particular section, which can help narrow down the search.
Let’s say you have a picture of a business where a crime took place, but you don’t have an address. There’s no name on the building, but there is a large logo. You can crop the image to just the logo and use that in Images search. You may be able to get the address in the matter of seconds based on the custom logo and your cropping.
Google Alerts is useful for when you want to be alerted about certain words or phrases that are used in articles. After setting up a Google Alert, you will be emailed every time your designated word or phrase is mentioned in any media.
Google Trends shows how often people are searching a particular subject and which queries are the most popular at the moment. Although the default view is global trends, you can also set it to any designated location.
Other Googles and Google Translate
These are Google extensions that are for certain languages and countries. You can use these extensions to check out news tied to a specific country and language.
Google Translate is a service that Russell says is constantly improving. Right now the best translations are the romance-to-romance translations, he said.
Using Google extensions and language translations can be helpful because there differences in searches across languages and cultures. Russell explained that the Italian Wikipedia article for Leonardo da Vinci has twice as many words as the English version.
Google can be an extremely useful tool in the world of journalism. How we choose to utilize it can make or break our research. If you are ever unsure or stuck on something, Russell offers some great advice: “When in doubt, search it out.”
Danielle Kirsh is the current editor for the Spartan Echo at Norfolk State University and will be the online/managing editor in the fall semester. She hopes to be a photojournalist abroad. She is a 2014 IRE Conference Knight Scholar.
By Laura Rena Murray
Ellen Gabler of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Tony Kovaleski of NBC Bay Area, Ellen Weiss of Scripps Washington Bureau and documentary producer Andrés Cediel discussed cautionary steps to consider when identifying sources and offered advice on getting reluctant sources to speak at the IRE Conference in San Francisco.
Key recommendations for locating trustworthy sources included understanding their motives for speaking, identifying potential roadblocks to understand their hesitation, doing a criminal background check and using mutual contacts to build credibility.
Kovaleski stressed the importance of making sure reluctant sources understand the risks. “I like my job. I like my stories,” he said, “but I like people more.”
Gabler suggested mining lawsuits, Facebook support groups and advocacy organizations for sources. By reporting thoroughly and requesting medical records, test results, journals and photos, she put her sources at ease because “they felt confident that I was taking so much time to tell their story.”
When dealing with agencies reluctant to release records or data, Gabler advised being polite while explaining the desire to understand the problem, taking copious notes, referring back to former correspondence and, when all else fails, calling the bosses.
Cediel also emphasized the importance of newsroom diversity. They used Spanish-speaking reporters in the newsroom to interview monolingual women who were not in the country legally.
To report on assault and rape, Cediel said it was important not to pressure sources into talking. “It had to be their decision,” he said, “not mine.”
Regarding possible retaliation for speaking out, Kovaleski said he always asks sources on camera, “What happens if you lose your job after this interview?” One technique he employs to mitigate potential retaliatory measures and establish trust is calling company numbers with a blocked number.
The panelists agreed it was important to follow a story until it was done and to write about retaliatory measures, if any occur.
“The source has to trust the journalist and the journalist has to trust the source,” Weiss said.
Laura Rena Murray is a San Francisco-based independent investigative journalist covering public interest and accountability stories that highlight corruption, mismanagement or human rights violations. Her cross border investigations have exposed resource deals brokered by corporate webs with pariah regimes throughout Africa and examined corporate land concessions in Southeast Asia that displace tens of thousands in return for millions in investments.
All of the following pop-up IRE by Design sessions will take place from 4:50 - 5:50 PM. You can find panel descriptions here.
Salon 1-3 | Help shape FOIA reform & join the #FOIAFriday community
Salon 4-6 | Managing your manager and wrangling your calendar
Salon 10-11 | The freelance dilemma: How to get your investigative story made
Salon 12-13 | More investigative interview tips and tactics with Julian Sher
Club Room | Tilling the fields of agribusiness: You should do this. Here's why and how
Nob Hill C | Local public employee salaries: Requesting and analyzing public payroll
Nob Hill D | Web scraping made easier with Helium Scraper
By Stephanie Ebbs
Investigative reporting is time-consuming and managing such laborious, long-term projects is a common concern for reporters and editors. The “Managing and Juggling Investigative Projects” panel addressed some of the ways journalists can incorporate investigative work while “feeding the beast” of daily news.
The panelists came from different types of news media but said time management is a concern across the board. Liz Roldan, news director for WFOR, Miami’s CBS affiliate, brought in the broadcast perspective. Sarah Karp from Catalyst Magazine in Chicago talked about time management at a digital and print magazine focused on education coverage. Jennifer Forsyth, deputy chief of investigations for the Wall Street Journal, shared her experience as a newspaper reporter and editor.
The panelists emphasized efficient ways to work, and offered tools for integrating an investigative approach with daily news.
Six tips for reporters:
- Take a bite. Not every investigative story has to be a massive undertaking. Investigative techniques can be used for daily stories, or investigative stories can be told one piece at a time. “If someone could write a book about it, don’t try to so a story on it,” said Sarah Karp.
- Set aside time to work only on investigative tasks. Keep a list of tasks that you complete in spare time throughout the day. Forsyth said she sets aside two lunch hours a week to complete tasks she otherwise wouldn’t have time to do.
- Keep an organized memo of your work including a timeline, notes, theories, and a log of records requests and sources contacted.
- Know the question or questions you are trying to answer. Be able to talk about your story starting with “Because…”
- Stay in touch with daily news for investigative potential or opportunities to contribute investigative expertise.
- Know what documents and data are available. Keeping up with court documents, investigations, inspections, reports, audits, academic research and court documents means you know what’s out there, even if you don’t use most of it in a story. File records requests when you decide to pursue a topic and keep them organized with a tool like FOIA Machine.
Five tips for editors:
- Ask yourself, “When is the best time for readers to see this?” This could include promoting the story on social media before and after publication or broadcast and considering when to set deadlines so the project will have the most impact.
- Evaluate whether the story is worth the investment and demand a unique focus. Some questions to ask include:
- Is there human drama?
- Are we speaking truth to power?
- Can we affect change?
- Has our audience heard this before?
- Set firm deadlines with reporters and keep the commitment. When a reporter delivers a draft, commit to editing it promptly. The goal is to complete the project, so emphasize a focused idea with a little flexibility instead of bouncing from idea to idea.
- Involve key players like graphics, developers and photographers early in the process. Develop templates for breaking or developing news so you can focus on content.
- Alternate developing news stories with more investigative angles. Protect reporters for 48 hours (or whatever deadline you set) so they can develop sources or get documents.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of tips, but there are lots of resources available. The IRE Conference Blog includes tips from previous conferences and the IRE website links to quick-turn and long-form investigative projects, including Behind the Story posts on how it all came together. You can also listen to the complete recording of this session (when it’s available).
Stephanie Ebbs is a second year graduate student focusing on investigative journalism and narrative writing at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she also earned her undergraduate degree in newspaper reporting. She considers herself somewhat of a renaissance woman in journalism, with interests in participatory journalism, political reporting, narrative storytelling and, of course, investigative reporting.
IRE members elected seven new directors to the IRE board on Saturday evening at the organization's annual conference in San Francisco.
The newly elected members are: Sarah Cohen, The New York Times; Andrew Donohue, The Center for Investigative Reporting; Ellen Gabler, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Jill Riepenhoff, The Columbus Dispatch; Nicole Vap, KUSA-TV in Denver; Phil Williams, WTVF-Nashville; and Chrys Wu, The New York Times.
The board then selected members of the executive committee. They are: Sarah Cohen, president; Matt Goldberg, vice president; Ellen Gabler, secretary; Andrew Donohue, treasurer, Josh Meyer and David Cay Johnston.
The membership also elected two members to the Contest Committee. They are: Fernando Diaz, Hoy Chicago, and Norberto Santana Jr., Voice of OC.
Investigative Reporters and Editors has named the U.S. Navy and the governors of Oklahoma and Missouri as winners of its second-annual Golden Padlock Award recognizing the most secretive U.S. agency or individual.
The U.S. Navy FOIA office was named a winner for blocking access to records about a deadly shooting rampage in Washington, D.C. that killed 12 people last year. After the September 2013 massacre at the US Navy’s Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., the Navy circled the wagons, especially when WRC-TV reporter Scott MacFarlane submitted FOIA requests for images, videos and security-related memos. The Navy not only blocked the request but Navy FOIA officer Robin Patterson, in an internal memo, detailed an elaborate plan to stymie MacFarlane’s request and others. The memo, which was accidentally released to MacFarlane, triggered an onslaught of media coverage, a written apology to MacFarlane by a Navy supervisor, a lawsuit against the Navy FOIA office and an internal Navy review of the agency’s FOIA procedures. But to this day, the Navy has still not responded to MacFarlane’s FOIA despite numerous requests.
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon were co-winners for secrecy around state executions. After Missouri announced last year it was making the state's execution drug supplier a legally protected secret, officials began redacting all identifying information in response to freedom of information requests. When journalists eventually learned the name of the hidden supplier, they reported the company was not licensed in the state, had been cited in the past by regulatory agencies and was paid thousands of dollars for its services in cash deliveries by a high-ranking state official. Rather than embracing greater openness and transparency following the revelations, the state again shrouded its new, unknown execution drug supplier in secrecy where it remains today. In April, following a botched execution in Oklahoma, journalists were stonewalled by a law preventing the public from learning the name of the physician overseeing the execution, the supplier of the drugs and the credentials of the medical professional who may have improperly inserted a failed IV line. Under the law, details that could explain the gruesome last minutes of the inmate's life and seek accountability remain hidden from public knowledge.
"Being named the most secretive government agencies amid competition this fierce requires an unwavering commitment to undermining the public’s right to know," said IRE board member and Golden Padlock committee chair Robert Cribb. "The creativity and innovation behind their cloak and dagger efforts have distinguished them for this unique honor."
IRE invited a representative from the winning agencies to attend and receive the honor. No response was received.
To learn about the 2014 finalists, click here.
By Emily Burns
David Krajicek was a reporter at the New York Daily News in 1989 when the Central Park jogger case grabbed the attention of all of New York. Krajicek was assigned to report on the case, and at a panel on the media’s role in reporting in wrongful convictions on Thursday, Krajicek said errors were made in the overall reporting of the case.
Since then, Krajicek has continued to report on criminal justice, and also studies media’s influence and role in wrongful convictions. This past winter, Krajicek looked into three wrongful conviction cases to see what the media’s role might have been.
“The media rarely is blamed, but the media frequently plays a role, as it did in kind of an ancillary way in the Central Park jogger case,” Krajicek said.
The cases highlighted in Krajicek’s report were the Groveland Boys case from Florida in 1949, the Walter McMillan case from Alabama in 1986, and the Kirk Bloodsworth case out of Baltimore County in 1984.
Maurice Possley, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who is now the senior researcher for The National Registry of Exonerations, also spoke about his work covering wrongful convictions. One of his main tips for reporting on wrongful convictions was to not believe everything in a police report. He said he doesn’t believe anything in the reports is true until he can personally verify it.
Possley also spoke about the personal challenges reporting on wrongful convictions can present.
“If you do this work, be prepared for a lot of disappointment, a long slog, but if you come to believe someone is innocent, it will haunt your dreams,” Possley said.
Jim Dwyer, a New York Times columnist who has also written an interactive digital book about the science of how things can go wrong in criminal cases, also spoke on the panel.
Using examples from his book to illustrate his points, Dwyer spoke primarily about the importance of looking for for errors in the conviction process.
“Looking at wrongful convictions now involves a lot of holistic thinking,” Dwyer said. “When a system fails, a lot of things go wrong.”
Dwyer said it’s important for journalists to understand what mistakes are made in the investigation and judicial process that go beyond the initially apparent mistakes.
The panelists also had suggestions for journalists who want to cover wrongful convictions.
“Journalists can do more good preventing wrongful convictions than investigating ones that already happened,” Possley said.
Dwyer came back to the Central Park jogger case to show the importance of his suggestion.
“The real untold story of wrongful convictions is the wrongful liberty that goes along with them,” Dwyer said. “And the case in point is the guy that raped the Central Park jogger – he went on to rape five more women, kill one of them, maim others.”
Emily Burns works as an investigative researcher for inewsource, a media partner of KPBS. Emily also works as an assistant producer at KPBS, the local PBS and NPR affiliate in San Diego.
DocumentCloud, a free, open source tool used by hundreds of newsrooms to analyze and publish documents, will improve its offerings and develop a plan toward sustainability with $1.4 million in new support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The two-year support will focus on strengthening the future of DocumentCloud and introducing enhancements and features that will make the popular platform faster, easier to use and more robust.
DocumentCloud was created with the support of a Knight News Challenge Grant in 2009 and became a project of the Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2011. It now hosts more than 1 million documents that have been uploaded, analyzed, annotated and published by journalists to better inform their audiences and make their own work more transparent. Material available on DocumentCloud.org has received more than 200 million hits, and has been used for stories as high profile as the release of the Snowden documents, which were presented to the public by The Washington Post and The Guardian via the platform.
“DocumentCloud has proven itself as an essential tool for in-depth, quality journalism—allowing reporters to comb through public documents in an efficient, collaborative and exhaustive manner,” said Michael Maness, Knight Foundation vice president for journalism and media innovation. “This next phase of its growth will help it become even more effective and ensure its future as standard in newsrooms everywhere.”
New funding for DocumentCloud was shaped by a market study designed to look at ways to make the tool better and more sustainable; the study included a survey of user preferences, a review of similar software tools, and consultation with experts. Based on study outcomes, the goal is to keep basic services free, while adding features that users can purchase through subscription services. Knight support will allow the DocumentCloud team to expand, creating the capacity to improve the basic service and add premium features.
Improvements to the tool will make it faster and more user-friendly. Existing archives will be more accessible and documents will be easier to share. DocumentCloud will redesign the platform to manage a larger number of users and future technology needs. A new advisory group of media entrepreneurs will help guide DocumentCloud’s growth.
“Hundreds of newsrooms in the U.S. and around the world rely on DocumentCloud to enhance the impact and credibility of their work, and to empower their audiences to dig into source material on their own,” said Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, which operates the service. “This crucial grant will allow us to both provide better service and build a foundation for DocumentCloud's future.”
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About IRE
Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting. IRE was formed in 1975 to create a forum in which journalists throughout the world could help each other by sharing story ideas, newsgathering techniques and news sources. IRE provides members access to thousands of reporting tip sheets and other materials through its resource center and hosts conferences and specialized training throughout the country. Programs of IRE include the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting and DocumentCloud.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit www.KnightFoundation.org.
Contacts:
Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, 817-726-1621, mark@ire.org
Anusha Alikhan, Director of Communications, Knight Foundation, 305-908-2677, media@knightfoundation.org
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