Searching with Search Engines

Searching can be frustrating because the search engines may return thousands of sites without offering the information you seek. But you can narrow your search from the start by selecting a topic listed by the search engine.

If you are looking for an e-mail address, phone numbers or addresses, every search engines offers people connectors. However, most of them are out of date or unreliable. It’s best to ask your sources for their phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Try finding yourself in any of the people finders on a search engine to test them.

Almost all search engines also include mapping programs that will give you directions from one place to another or pinpoint an address. These are very helpful for journalists seeking directions to an assignment. You can also use them for personal reasons: to find a party, a friend’s house or any place you plan to visit. However, anyone also can find your house, which you might keep in mind if you plan to put your address on your resume or Web site and you are concerned about privacy. Try finding your own address with a mapping search engine.

One of the most popular uses of the Internet is participation in “discussion groups”, also called “online forums” or “bulletin boards”. In all of them, people with common interests send and receive messages via e-mail. All the messages are automatically distributed to the list of people who are subscribed to the group. Subscription in most of these groups is free.

Several journalism groups specialize in discussion of various beats, investigative reporting, journalism education and the new media. Other discussion groups can also be helpful in reporting because the people who participate in them can become valuable sources. However, be cautious before you quote form a discussion group in a story. Ethically, you should seek permission from the person who posts the message you want to use. You also should check the accuracy of such messages because you publish them.

E-mail

E-mail is the biggest use of the Internet. You probably know how to use e-mail for personal messages, so this section will focus more on the use of e-mail as a reporting technique.

How effective is e-mail for reporting? E-mail is an excellent way to reach sources who are hard to reach by telephone or in person. It also can be helpful as a reporting technique if you have only one or two questions to ask or if you are seeking information from a discussion group about a topic you are researching. However, e-mail does not give you the advantage of asking spontaneous follow-up questions, which often are the most important questions in an interview. Nor does it lend itself to a long list of questions.

As with discussion groups, don’t quote form an e-mail message for publication without seeking the source’s permission. That’s like quoting from a conversation you overheard or from a personal letter. Legally, all information published in written or readable form is copyrighted. Whether citing an e-mail message in a public discussion group violates the law is uncertain, but it is ethical to ask people before using their comments.

Look through the text again and find words in the part 1) of the text which mean:

- To be fined for breaking driving rules

- An adopting parent

- Search for information

- The lack of smth

Match the words with their synonyms (Parts 2) and 3)):