Last week, my colleagues at Poynter and PolitiFact delivered a webinar absolutely packed with strategies and tools to help you do better research. Today I want to share three of the many things I learned from The 5 Ws of Research, specifically about the who, when and where.

Who

“There’s no such thing as a relationship database,” said researcher Caryn Baird. “The best place to find them is obituaries.”

I love this tip, and not just because I love obits. In the five years I wrote them for the Tampa Bay Times, existing obituaries were a great way to connect people, see who else I should be reaching out to and what organizations might be able to tell me more. I also regularly used Facebook to find people and establish connections. (Most people have zero privacy set up around their pages. Don’t do that.)

When

Especially when covering people in political life, check and see if people’s biographies align across social media platforms and through various archives, including LexisNexis and newspapers.com. 

When in doubt, pick up the phone and call a place to verify, Baird said.

And while searching to see if someone’s timeline adds up, she recommends you:

• Check county, state and federal courts

• Check state and federal campaign contributions

• Check LinkedIn

• Use Wayback Machine to check their bio from a place they used to work

PolitiFact reporter Loreben Tuquero started a section on geolocation with a little about reverse image searches. This is a strategy Poynter’s MediaWise has taught for years, and an essential first step in verifying an image. 

“So if you’re on Google Chrome, one easy way to do that is by right-clicking an image and clicking ‘search with Google Lens,’” Tuquero said in the session. “This will open a tab of results of websites and posts with the same image.”

You can learn so much more from Tuquero and Baird by watching the webinar. 

While you’re here:

• Read the newest piece in The Poynter 50 series, from Poynter’s Rick Edmonds: “Did Craigslist decimate newspapers? Legend meets reality.”

• Poynter’s Angela Fu reports “Gannett is cutting $100 million and rethinking subscriptions to curb falling revenue.”

• Here’s the developing schedule for the online Mental Health in Journalism Summit, happening Oct. 8-10. 

• From Josh Benton at Nieman Lab, read about how Alden Global Capital is taking its failed attempt to buy The Dallas Morning News.

• From Sophie Culpepper at Nieman Lab, read about how the Kansas City Defender is planning to reopen Missouri’s oldest Black bookstore. 

• I’m also loving this monthly series from Nieman Lab that ranks the top 25 local newspaper sites.  

• You still have time to sign up for this excellent five-week virtual workshop on the fundamentals of investigative journalism, with ProPublica’s deputy managing editor, Alex Zayas.  

• And I’m so excited about our upcoming four-week virtual memoir writing workshop. I hope you’ll join us or share this with someone who should. 

That’s it for me. Last weekend, I got to go scalloping for the first time. I’ve heard it’s like an Easter egg hunt, but the water was a little murky from last year’s hurricanes, so it was a bit more like whack-a-mole. We figured out that if we prodded the sand with our nets, eventually we’d find a scallop, which would come snapping up trying to get away. It’s a pretty delightful thing to see.

Kristen 🐚