The research required email tracking and analysis, deep data mining, as well as in-depth interviews.
These are resources that are now extremely valuable to me.
As the Internet expands, the community of citizen journalists continues to grow.
I also welcome contact with, and collaboration with, fellow online researchers and writers.
Early on, bloggers were scorned by mainstream journalists.
My favorite page is the Principles of Journalism list oflegal and ethical guidelines.
Number 1 is the most important - “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.”
These are the places that you’ll want to go to initially to launch your investigation.
The first resource is a website that’s actually somewhat poorly designed.
The next resource, my friends, isRefDesk.
Like the previous website, it is clearly not created with pretty formatting or bells and whistles in mind.
This one page is like having the entire Internet at your fingertips - it’s amazing!
An important part of being a good journalist is knowing what’s relevant and important to the general public.
Charnita wrote about3 excellent social search enginesthat you might use to find people.
Abhijeet hit on Snitch.Name, another very cool resource to do the same sort of digging.
Another useful area is determining what’s hot at the moment - the current Internet buzz.
Leon covered5 great buzz and viral video websites, and John covered how tocapture breaking news on Twitter.
Local Information and Public Records
Probablythemost valuable references for a journalist are public records.
Every good citizen journalist owns a trusty library card.
