I have been fortunate to work with some amazing reporters on a myriad of topics. From researching the history of feral children to hunting down witnesses to an airplane crash in the late 1970s, the requests had me hunting through jail records, flight data, court filings and obituaries. Over the years, I have accumulated over 700 bookmarks to databases, archives and court systems.
I frequently give talks to help young journalists learn some tricks of my trade because I am a librarian by trade and training. When you walk into a library and ask the librarian for a book, they search through thousands of titles and retrieve just one or two that will be useful.
Similarly, when a reporter asks me for a cell phone number or an email, I have to search through thousands of possibilities and provide just one or two contact points. It is illegal to serve cell phone numbers in a directory — you have to hunt for someone’s number. Emails also need to be searched for. There is no single directory listing all your email addresses.
I like to remind folks that news is always past tense. Arrests, fires, car accidents, births, bank robberies, speeches — they all happened and there ought to be a discoverable paper trail.
Here are some tools that can help you in your daily work:
Find out who used to live in a city and where: Polk City Directories. If it is not online here, then check your local library. They will have a full run of the hard copy. For example, a ‘James Marshall’ lived at 567 Haight St in San Francisco in 1953.
If you’re still stumped, reach out to us. We are here to help you.
