The Craft of Research

What are Nexis and Factiva?  They are commercial competitors that archive the backfiles of thousands of publications, including newspapers, magazines, newsletters, media transcripts and others, such as major blogs. 

• The difference between the two services is not significant.
• Since it’s owned by Dow Jones, Factiva has the exlusive online full text content of the DJ wires, WSJ, Barron’s and Reuters wires.
• The command languages are different, but the functions are the same.

 Using the services–key points:

• It is expected that this type of background work should be performed for every work assignment to bring context and details to the story. 
• It should bring to light any article that’s already been written on the topic, person, event or company. 
• For the most part, these publications have been vetted for errors. 
• This is searching the deep web, that which doesn’t show up when search engines crawl the web.  Cannot get this stuff on Google, for the most part.
• It’s all tagged/indexed consistently, resulting in more precise results.

This is the official research blog for Rebecca Leung’s Fall 2009 section of Craft I.  You’ll also find posts from the past when it served the same function for Craft sections taught by Steve Strasser and Tim Harper.  It’s the spot for research handouts, assignments, news, tips and whatever else comes up during the semester.

My name is Jack Styczynski and this is my second year as a Research Adjunct at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.  Pretty much everything you’d want to know about my career in the news media biz can be found here.

Personally, I love basketball, New Orleans and gospel music, both classic and contemporary. If you still need to know more, you can peep last year’s welcome message.

Check in often.  And welcome to the J-school!  Talk soon.

OK, I won’t bore you with a kiddie-style rundown of everything I did the last few months, but here’s some stuff I came across that may interest you…

Just this month, MSNBC acquired EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news aggregator you should definitely check out if you’re not already familiar with it. Also, several parties are challenging a settlement between Google Books and authors and publishers. And this week, I was happy to read that Wikipedia is getting stricter.

Earlier, I stumbled upon an interesting (albeit lengthy) web project about The Future of Journalism. Related to that, I largely agreed with this Columbia Journalism Review article, but found this Huffington Post piece utterly ridiculous.

Here’s a good 4-minute video on political fact-checking.

Twitter obsessed? Then check out The Ultimate List of Twitter Tools.

Speaking of Twitter, Editor & Publisher posted the Wall Street Journal’s rules for online conduct and Pro Football Talk did likewise with ESPN’s guidelines. In January, Poynter had posted the New York Times policy on social networking.

Speaking of the Times, an embarrassing snafu there last month showed the importance of fact-checking and research (more here and here). On the positive side, this New York City homicides map is pretty impressive and the paper continues to develop the Represent database of elected officials representing NYC addresses. Lastly, if you’re looking for Times-related laughs, did you read this article or see this segment from Comedy Central’s Daily Show?