Ever make it past page 10 on a Google search? If not, you might want to reconsider. Some of the best untold stories of your coverage area could be buried beneath those top pages.
At least that’s what my friend, a young journalist on her second newspaper-reporting job, has found. She often uses Google searches when struggling with a story idea or finding sources.
“Skip the first 10 pages or so,” Betsy Lee, a reporter for St. Joseph News-Press — a 40,000-circulation daily newspaper in northwest Missouri — said in an e-mail to Poynter Online. “You can find information and people that are not on the radar screen.”
Lee started using this technique for her first journalism job. She compiled a folder of information about the community she was covering that went beyond the well-known institutions.
“When I got past the Chamber of Commerce Web site to the more personal pages, I found real people with interesting stories,” Lee said.
She uses this type of searching as a starting point — and to save time on deadline. Earlier this year, Lee had to quickly turn out a story on emergency contraception becoming available without a prescription. She wanted to talk with someone who had experience with the drug. So she typed several combinations of the topic and her city into Google:
- “plan b” and “St. Joseph, MO”
- “ec” and “St. Joseph, MO”
- “emergency contraception” and “St. Joseph, MO”
Once she hit results, Lee scanned for personal Web pages, blogs and MySpace pages. She found a young woman who had used emergency contraception and had posted her experiences on a personal Web site. After e-mailing her and getting a response, the two chatted over the phone.
“People are often extremely honest online,” Lee said. “She wrote that using the emergency contraception pill was like ‘having her period times 100’ — a quote she repeated later when we talked.”
With the same technique, Lee also found a business owner to interview when reporting a story about Voice over Internet Protocol, a technology that allows you to make calls
using a broadband Internet connection instead of a
regular phone line. She typed in “Skype,” a popular VoIP program, and different cities in her coverage area. After scanning business Web pages, she found her source. People often include their name and contact information on their sites, she said.
Lee gave me another hint: Make sure to click on the “cached” version of the page, which highlights the words you typed into Google. That way, you don’t have to scan the whole page.
“You can just zip down to the highlighted words to see if the page is helpful.”