Where’s Waldo

Finding Sources

You’ve probably heard of Where’s Waldo? – the series of kids’ books, posters, and other paraphernalia that involves trying to find buried in complicated and busy pictures an odd character in a ski cap.

Chances are you can sympathize with the kids because you know what it’s like trying to find people – sources – for one of your stories. Here are some techniques that can help.

Online

First step is to understand the type of person you seek. It’s typically going to be either an “expert” or a “regular person.” You’ll probably need to look for the two types differently.

If it’s an expert, you could try one of the expert databases (more of the invisible web) such as ExpertSource from BusinessWire or ProfNet from PRNewswire. There are other collections as well:

· Go to either Google Directory or Yahoo Directory and search for the term experts. In Google, you’ll find yourself at the Ask an Expert directory listings, where you can pose questions to various types of experts, including chefs and linguists. Yahoo has an Ask an Expert directory also, and in addition has Ask an Expert as a topic in a number of disciplines, including nutrition, astronomy, engineering, and science.

· Check out a university online. Their web pages almost always have faculty listings by subject, and typically they also have phone and email contact information for each (invisible web-type databases). Or you could look up the public information officers and get help finding the right person.

· There are specialty directories for journalists that often have pointers to places to find expert sources. (I once stumbled across a web site to find Canadian political activists.) Some good ones are Megasources (from a retired journalism professor), RobertNiles.com, Power Reporting, and Journalism Resources.

· For the U.S. government’s resources, go to a Navy resource with impressive scope.

· Use business social networking. Sites like LinkedIn.com

You could also try searching the web and your favorite archive of news stories as well as magazine and newspaper archives. (That includes commercial databases like Lexis/Nexis, if you have access to them – and you’ll find some number available for free at your public library.) Think about words that might indicate an expert in the context of an article, and you might find any of the following:

· analyst

· expert

· professor

· observer

· consultant

· attorney

· doctor

· researcher

· official

And the list could go on. To find an expert, you’d use a set of keywords that got you into the right ballpark of context, then try adding an appropriate title (one at a time) to see who popped up. You can also look for authors of books about the topic; search on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, where each book has a page with author and publisher names.

You could also go to an industry or special interest group that might provide an expert. Search for the topic as a keyword and try adding association, organization, coalition (more for political activism), and similar words to find groups that address particular topics. (Check directory listings as well as Web pages.)

Often more difficult to find is the “regular person” – who, if you’re writing for one of the women’s magazines, should be between 27 and 28, come from a mixed ethnic background of southeast Asian and Inuit, live within a three block radius of the Sears Tower in Chicago, and have a child that was the result of immaculate conception. How do you find them, short of sending out trolling messages on writers' boards and calling every single one of your second cousins to see whom they know? Here are some techniques that might help:

Check a relevant newsgroup. People chat about things online all the time in special interest groups. Go to Yahoo Directory or Google Directory and search for newsgroups or newsgroup directories. One such is Title.Net. Go there and you’ll see that the first two choices are email newsletters and e-zines (possible expert material) and Usenet newsgroups, which is what we want at the moment. Click on that link and then use a single keyword for a topic area. Once you have some appropriate groups, you can post messages looking for the types of people you need.

Search all newsgroups. The weakness of checking particular news groups is that you’re limited to waiting for someone to answer, and you’re also assuming that the lead will come from one of a limited set of newsgroups. But you can also try to find people who have posted something relevant and then contact them (if their email is listed in the post). I have used Google Groups (groups.google.com) with some good results. The groups include both Google’s own and the Usenet newsgroups, which are the “real” newsgroups on the Internet.

Affiliations. Just as there are groups for industries and experts, there are groups of people who bond together over a given interest or experience. If you needed a cancer survivor, for example, you could search for “cancer survivors” and either group or support. A quick search on “mothers” in Google Directory would turn up “Mothers of Preschoolers”, which is an “international support network of women who share the common bond of preschool age children.” Retired firefighter? How about the Syracuse Retired Firefighters Association? (Assuming that New York will do and you don’t need to find one at the moment from Mississippi.) The group could also be a church or temple, a senior activity center, a grass roots activist organization, a parent-teachers organization, or even a phone book (when you are looking for someone who lives in some place or another). It could be a labor union or a political party or a fan club. Many high tech products have at least one “user group”, and there is a “support group” for almost any problem. Think about where you might go or what you might do in a specific situation, and then go look there.

Blogs. When regular people decide to make their opinions known and put them on the Web, they make themselves available to be found. There are a number of blog search engines: Google Blog Search (blogsearch.google.com); Technorati; BlogPulse (great tools for trends on buzzword term use in blogs, watching conversations between bloggers, and more); and PubSub (set keywords and see new posts as they come out). A search on the Web will also turn up others.

Social networks. Sites like MySpace.com have become famous (or infamous) because of the amount of personal information you can find. Guess what – they typically have search capabilities.

Specialty sources. There is at least one tool, like the specialty directories for experts, that is actually aimed at “regular” people. Writer Jen Singer has a site called MommaSaid.net. She has a feature called the Magazine Rack where posts request from journalists looking for moms and her readers then respond to the ones that interest them.

Indirect searches. Sometimes looking at related topics helps. For example, interests are often accompanied by the desire for related equipment, books, and so on. You can try eBay and see who is bidding on something relevant to your topic, then contacting the person and seeing if he or she might be a good candidate.

Real World

Not everything is available online, and if you stick strictly with Web-accessible sources, you’re cutting yourself off from a large part of the world. Here are some excellent old-fashioned tools:

Let your fingers do the walking. The phone book (whether paper or electronic versions) is an excellent source. White pages help you find specific people. It obviously doesn’t work for those with unlisted numbers, but you might be surprised at the people who can be found. Yellow page directories give you the opportunity to browse a given geographic area by business category. Need to find a general contractor in Philadelphia? Get a copy of the appropriate phone book (or the online equivalent) and start dialing.

Just show up. It can be fun and exciting – and certainly a break in routine – to go to some spot and stop people to ask them questions. Many will not only give you the time of day if you explain that you are a reporter, but will answer questions. There are times that shoe leather is the only way of doing research.

Get carded. Go to the public library and talk to reference librarians. They are trained to find information that will elude the rest of us. You’ll learn about such reference books as the Directory of Associations (organizations of all types) and Who’s Who (not the scam versions, but the real thing that may have organization affiliations where you can find a famous person).

Give a call. Find the most likely entities or experts that would have a connection to the type of people you seek and pick up the telephone. Often you’ll find someone who sees value in what you’re writing and will want to help find interview subjects. It’s similar to the online version, except you don’t wait for people to check their email and don’t assume that names will always be clearly available.

Place an ad. This is a little more limited in usefulness, I think but there are times that you need a specific type of person where there is no obviously associated entity – perhaps looking for the descendants of a particular person in a given town. You can always place an ad in a local paper and hope that someone sees it. Because of the hit-or-miss nature and the expense, I’d consider this a last resort, but one worth knowing just in case.

Check a newspaper or magazine. Not all publications have their contents online, but those that don’t might still have indexes or back copies at libraries.

http:///www.eriksherman.com/WriterBiz

For information on the Online Research e-book, email erikbsherman@gmail.com.