Tag Archives: ADVANCED SEARCH

I made a bunch of tools to make journalists’ lives easier. Here are my 5 favourites

Clocks — Image by Sean MacEntee. CC BY 2.0 license

Tara Calishain used JavaScript to create a collection of tools that save time for journalists conducting research. In a special guest post for OJB, she explains how five of those work.

It’s been over 25 years since I wrote the Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research (and 24 years since I started my blog ResearchBuzz), but search engines and the problem of finding things on the Internet remain just as fascinating to me. Over this summer I began trying to actually solve search challenges instead of just thinking about them — and working out techniques to minimize them.

What changed? I began learning JavaScript! I spent some time in a SkillShare class in May, started a GitHub account in June, and by Labor Day I had a collection of about twenty of what I’m calling ResearchBuzz Search Gizmos.

They’re all freely available at researchbuzz.github.io. Some of them require API keys, but the keys are free as well.

I love all my little Gizmos and could never pick an absolute favorite, but I think these would be most useful to journalists.

Continue reading →

This Twitter hack can help journalists to check what a group of people was tweeting about on a particular day

How to: find local sources for an election in another country using Facebook Graph

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Last week one of the students on my MA in Online Journalism was looking to find French people based in the city for a local angle on the presidential elections taking place in France. “Ah!” I thought. “That’s a job for a Facebook Graph search”. It’s the sort of situation that arises regularly in the newsroom — so here’s how to do it:

What is Facebook Graph search — and why is it useful for journalists?

Facebook Graph Search in 2013

Facebook Graph was launched in 2013 as a specific tool for finding people based on their interests. The ‘graph’ part refers to its ability to find people based on intersecting qualities: combinations of their likes, places of work, friends, and where they live and come from.

The tool itself was dropped in 2014, but the ability to search based on intersecting qualities remained, as part of the general Facebook search. You just have to know how to use it… Continue reading →

The most-read posts on Online Journalism Blog — and on Medium — in 2016

Too many election tweets? Some simple Tweetdeck techniques for filtering the information overload

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Tonight many journalists will have Tweetdeck or similar social media dashboards ‘tuned in’ to coverage of the US election, typically by creating columns to monitor activity on key hashtags like #Election2016. But on a big occasion like this, the volume of tweets becomes unmanageable. Here then are a few quick techniques to surface tweets that are likely to be most useful to reporters:

Picking the right hashtags: Hashtagify

Hashtagify is a tool for finding out the popularity of certain hashtags. Type a tag into the search box and you’ll get a network diagram like the one shown above — but you can also switch to ‘Table mode’ to get a list of tags that you can sort by popularity, correlation, weekly or monthly trend. Continue reading →

How to find ‘feeds for leads’ as a journalist

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Listening. Image by Rob Franksdad

When a journalist gets their first job, or switches role to a new area or specialism, they need to quickly work out where to find useful leads. This often involves the use of feeds, email alerts, and social networks. In this post I’m going to explain a range of search techniques for finding useful sources across a range of platforms. Continue reading →

5 ways to find useful Snapchat accounts to follow as a journalist

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This post is an extract from the book Snapchat for Journalists

Finding Snapchat accounts to follow is harder than it needs to be. There are some directories, such as Snapcodes, but these rely on user submissions. The iPhone app GhostCodes also ‘curates’ lists of accounts by category, but also relies on users giving their own usernames.

You can find some articles highlighting interesting accounts to follow on Snapchat. One useful search phrase to use for finding those is this:

Here are 4 useful techniques for tracking them down.

Method 1: The advanced search

The most obvious approach is to look for some articles highlighting interesting accounts to follow on Snapchat. You can narrow this a little by using search operators like allintitle: (which restricts results to those where the words are in the page title).

One useful search phrase to use with this is: Continue reading →

How to: find local Twitter reaction to a national event

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When a national news story breaks and you need local reaction, how do you exclude the national-level updates that dominate all the other coverage? On Twitter there’s a simple answer: search within lists.

Here’s how you do it. Continue reading →

5 ways journalists can use Google tools – from the Digital News Roadshow

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Google organised a free workshop on 14 December 2015 in Birmingham focused on how journalists can use technology to improve and complement their stories.

In this post Carla Pedret summarises some tips Google News Lab’s Matt Cooke gave during the event. You can read more about the event using the hashtag #DNRoadShow.

1. Putting ourselves in our audience’s shoes

As journalists we sometimes use words that we think are commonly used by our audience but actually are not.

In addition, one of the biggest difficulties is how to approach a story in a fresh way or a way that is attractive for our readers. Google Trends can give us some clues. Continue reading →

How do you find useful Twitter accounts? 5 tips for journalists

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A Twitter network identified by Bluenose

A version of this post originally appeared on Help Me Investigate Welfare.

Every so often on Help Me Investigate we compile a list* of people on Twitter to follow on particular issues. Here’s how we do it:

1. Search Twitter biographies only

The quickest way to kick off your Twitter list is to search Twitter biographies for users who mention the areas you’re interested in.

Twitter tool FollowerWonk has a facility for searching biographies on the site – make sure you select “search Twitter bios only” from the drop-down menu. Continue reading →