Last year, Kim McDonald, science writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, led the competition in ferreting out details of the top quark story. This spring, San Francisco Chronicle science reporter Charles Petit found an unpublicized new planet discovery. Chicago-based Time magazine correspondent J. Madeleine Nash tracked down sources in Europe and Asia.
In these cases, the Internet linked them to people and information they likely wouldn't have found by other means or as quickly.
"Over the past few years, the Internet has become an essential tool in the reporter's toolbox," says Nora Paul, library director at Florida's Poynter Institute for Media Studies and author of Computer Assisted Research: A guide to tapping on-line information.
About three-fourths of journalists who responded to a recent survey, Media in Cyberspace Study II, by Columbia University professor Steven Ross and public relations consultant Don Middleberg, used the Internet for personal tasks or business tasks in 1995.
The Internet has become much easier to use-almost intuitive. It connects journalists with a vast amount of resources, and more people and information come on-line daily. Free and powerful search engines boost your chances of finding meaningful information. The Net can help savvy on-line reporters stay ahead of their competition. And for some it may mean new job opportunities.
"In another year, your basic question-how do you use the Internet in your work-will seem as impossibly broad as if you asked: How do you use the telephone in your work, or how do you use the mail in your work? Or how do you use paper in your work?" says Robert Finn, free-lance science writer and NASW.org's new "cybrarian." "It's become such a basic tool that I would hate to do without it."
It's not perfect. The Internet takes time to learn and time to use. It can be more frustrating than fruitful on tight deadlines. Popularity has its price: Increased traffic has slowed down and, at times, overwhelmed parts of the network. It's often difficult to find specific information; there's no central index. As for privacy-forget it. Your private correspondence with a source can be copied and routed to anyone-including your competition. Ditto with embargoed news. And who are those people on the other end of the network, anyway? Credible sources or clever mischief makers?
The Internet is made up of inter-networked connections among regional member networks, which link millions of computers found in companies, universities, government agencies, libraries, television and newspaper stations and the commercial information service you may subscribe to.
"It can seem like a nightmarish extension of cable TV-5 million channels, not much one wants to see," Paul says. "But useful stuff is out there."
Here are some of the basic Internet resource types most useful for journalists-e-mail, discussion groups and the World Wide Web-with real-life examples of how your colleagues are applying these resources to the science beat as well as some cautions about potential problems that lie in wait.
In a sidebar, specific Internet resources will be grouped by common information needs: finding experts, sources and story ideas, reviewing background articles, locating statistics and checking facts, looking for source documents and looking for public records.
Electronic Mail
E-mail is the Internet's workhorse. If you have an Internet connection-through your company, school, government organization or private Internet provider-then you have e-mail. You can use your e-mail for one-on-one correspondence with individuals, participate in discussion groups and receive news updates from your favorite institutions.
For science writers, e-mail helps to find sources, arrange and sometimes conduct interviews, receive news tips and releases, pitch stories, submit drafts and corrections to articles, and participate in on-line discussion groups.
Kate King, producer for CNN's Science & Technology Week, uses e-mail as a way to make initial contact with experts. "It's just about as quick as the phone, but lets me explain clearly what I want, and why, and then gives the recipient a chance to read the message when they want to and think about it before answering," King says. "Of course it doesn't usually work so well in a breaking news situation, but in the normal course of doing science features, it is great."
Expensive and hard to coordinate across time zones by phone, international connections become a breeze by e-mail.
E-mail helped public-relations consultant Lynne Friedmann publicize the Danish, French and Swiss winners of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. She electronically surveyed Europe-based environmental writers to plan a news release strategy, expedited the scientists' review and approval process for the news release, contacted and sent the release to the PIO's affiliated with the winners' universities, sent the release to the winners' local and national news organizations, and found other avenues to get the news out.
"This resulted in very rapid information gathering and the ability to reach a highly targeted media audience," Friedmann says. "This did not replace but was done as an adjunct to mailing news releases and Business Wire distribution."
"E-mail is also good for getting quick answers to questions from scientists who are hard to reach, either because they're in Japan or they're incredibly busy," says Karen Hopkin, senior producer for Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. "Or sometimes they've got six layers of secretaries and assistants separating them from the unwashed masses, but they still answer their own e-mail."
Lisa Wilson, west coast correspondent for Chemical and Engineering News, confesses to using e-mail almost as much as she uses the phone for reaching traveling and overseas scientists. "E-mail has saved more than one story," Wilson says.
Thomas H. Maugh II, medical writer for the Los Angeles Times, receives media tip sheets from the weekly journals Science and Nature, as well as news from individual universities by e-mail.
In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a research institution who might not prefer to send you releases and tips by e-mail. As of June, the American Astronomical Society ceased sending press releases by "snailmail," the on-line term for traditional door-to-door postal delivery. Yet, the summer midwest meeting media attendance still exceeded expectations of society press officer Steve Maran. Gearing up for on-line news delivery isn't cheap, and these days organizations would rather be investing in hardware and software than shelling out money for printing and postage.
Once the glamour wears off, you'll find e-mail has as many inconveniences as the phone, fax and mail. E-mail is a two-way street, and if you're not checking and filing or tossing the incoming messages daily you will soon be overwhelmed by the sheer volume. Some e-mail programs, like Eudora, make it easier to file and filter messages. Some people, like freelance Larry Krumenaker, have set up more sophisticated personal computer filing systems, storing many press releases and other useful items in databases for easy retrieval.
Good interviews and great quotes don't often happen by e-mail. "E-mail responses are not quite as lively or comprehensive as live or phone interviews," says Science magazine writer Liz Pennisi. "But they do work in a pinch."
And forget privacy.
"The Internet's unbelievably leaky," says Sacramento Bee science writer Deborah Blum. "It takes only a keystroke to copy something over. In one case, I was actually copied an e-mail query from a reporter at Science magazine, which had gone to a researcher in another country. He had sent a copy of it and his response to a researcher in the U.S. That scientist copied it to one of my sources, who then copied the whole thing to me. Since then, I've found myself being very careful about what I will say in my electronic correspondence with scientists."
The World Wide Web
By far, the most popular and fastest growing feature on the Net is the World Wide Web. The Web uses slick magazine style "pages" to display text, pictures, charts, sounds and-if you have the computer memory and patience-video.
"In just three or four short years, the Web has changed from a novel and interesting concept to a commonly used blend of newspapers, magazines, television, radio and even the telephone," writes investigative television reporter Mike Wendland in his guide, Wired Journalist: Newsroom Guide to the Internet.
Software known as web browsers, such as the popular Netscape, allow you to locate and view web sites around the world; to navigate to other web sites by clicking on underlined words or graphics, known as "links," or encoded web address; and to save as "bookmarks" useful sites so you can find them again, much as you have compiled your personal telephone roster of science news sources.
The Web is becoming an important way for many government agencies, news organizations, associations and interest groups and individuals to disseminate information cheaper and faster.
For example, Stanford University is using its web page to offer more than they can include in a press release: color pictures, background documents, links to sources' web pages and links to related news resources, says Janet Basu, independent science journalist and Stanford News Service science writer. "Knowing what we offer, I'll probably be more eager to use these services for my next freelance article. I'll check their Web pages and see if they lead to anything intriguing."
Institutions are finding more creative ways to use the Web. Purdue University is sending releases and tips coded as Web pages by e-mail. Reporters save the page to their computers, open the page with their web browsers, find graphics and Web links to more information. And writing your own web page is relatively easy, once you learn a few simple commands.
The inter-linked nature of the Web is both useful and distracting. "Wandering the Web can be a little hypnotic, and it's easy to find hours gone with relatively little yield," says Barbara Gastel, associate professor of journalism and humanities in medicine at Texas A&M University, who is writing a health writers' handbook.
For a science writer, the Web is often useful for quick background on a topic or to locate a source, says Scientific American associate editor Tim Beardsley.
Beardsley frequently keys into the Community of Science Web site, a searchable database of 50,000 researchers around the country, as well as series of databases of grants funded by National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Small Business Innovation Research Program, and the Advanced Technology Program.
Federal grant searches are a favorite of Blum's too. "It takes about three clicks to find 100 grants on whatever your topic, including abstract and grant amount," she says.
The Poynter Institute offers a Hot News/Hot Research web page featuring a few useful links to research sources to help reporters understand and cover top stories. Science-related spring links included Chernobyl, Earth Day and Mad Cow Disease.
Science writers should check out the ambitious new Web site EurekaAlert!, initiated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and parked at Stanford. EurekAlert! aims to be the science news site, hoping to offer embargoed news from the leading science and medical journals, timely news releases from the country's top research institutions, search engines, mailserver service for the day's top science headlines, databases of science sources, homepages of science journalism organizations and leading peer-reviewed journals and more.
There is so much information on the web that one discriminating, well-maintained site can be invaluable.
"For a recent article on gene therapy, I found a French Web site that listed every ongoing gene therapy trial, the vector used, the principal investigator, etc." says Stephen Hart, a Puget Sound freelance science writer. "I also found the home pages for two important labs, complete with full-text articles, and the home page of a professor teaching a course in the subject of my article. Just today, I found that AAAS still maintains 'Science Sources' on the Web."
For lots of good technical reasons, there is no one single Internet index to everything. But there are lots of useful indexes to many things: experts guides at universities and organizations, phone books to universities across the country, groups of on-line newspapers and magazines, topical guides to specialty areas and more.
Powerful search engines have also made information easier to find by typing in key words. Some search engines have software "robots" and "spiders" that scan parts of the Web around the clock, storing indexes you can search. Popular search engines include Lycos, Inktomi, WebCrawler, WWW Worm, Open Text, Excite and Infoseek. It's a mammoth task; some search by title, some by full text. Even the largest search engine, Digital's Alta Vista, has only half the available pages indexed.
Other search engines are organized topically-by science, art, literature and so on-such as Yahoo, Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resources Guides, Whole Internet Catalog and TradeWave Galaxy. Each search engine will give you different results, so try several. Jeff Kahn, science writer for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, made multiple searches easier by setting up a page on the Northern California Science Writers Association web site where you can enter your search words just once and select several search engines.
Wading through so much information requires a more thoughtful and focused research strategy than past approaches. Just figuring out the best keywords for searching is a challenge. For example, stories on football rarely contain the word "football." A search can pull up thousands of web pages, usually ranked by perceived relevance to your quest. Each search engine's Web site provides tips for using it better.
A big drawback to the Web is the time it takes to download pages, especially during peak Internet hours. Or not being able to get a connection at all, reading instead: "Server may not be accepting connections or may be busy. Try again later"-the new version of the telephone's busy signal.
"The Web gives me greater power to gather information but also seems to inflict more dead time," Petit says, "while search engines or other hidden electronic homunculi are doing their stuff, I sit waiting and stewing."
Web speed can easily be increased by turning off images on your web browser and surfing in text only. Clean out your web browser "cache" (copies of recently visited Web pages), and try restarting the browser if you cannot get through to the pages you want to visit.
On-Line Discussion Groups
If you have e-mail capability, you can also join discussion groups on the Internet, in which every message goes to all the e-mail boxes of those who signed up for the group through mailservers such as Listserv. Mailservers can allow all registered users to post messages, or they may distribute messages only from a single source.
Mailservers can be "open" to anyone who wants to subscribe or "closed" to all but qualified participants. Both open and closed mailservers can be managed in two ways. "Moderated" mailservers generally have a person who looks over messages posted to the list, ensuring that the message is on topic. "Unmoderated" mailservers just pass along anything sent.
Pick your group carefully. You'll get a lot of e-mail, potentially from irrelevant or annoying groups. Active lists can generate 20-40 messages a day; many lists offer a "digest" option, where you can sign up to receive one e-mail a day with everyone's postings. "Lurk" for a while, just reading the content and tone of messages.
Discussions can also take place on newsgroups, which are posted publicly on Usenet. (Some mailservers are also posted publicly as newsgroups, too). Most of the commercial and educational Internet providers give you access to thousands of Usenet newsgroups, if not every single one.
Newsgroups tend to have more "noise," or irrelevant messages. Like many Internet resources, newsgroups can simply waste your time (although they may be entertaining), but others can be valuable. Check the archives and FAQ (answers to frequently asked questions) to review the scoop and past discussions. You can also search newsgroups using DejaNews, which not only finds key words but people who have posted messages (unless they have requested anonymity from DejaNews).
To a lot of journalists, discussion groups are more trouble than they're worth. But a selective and active on-line group, stocked full of experts and others interested in certain special topics can be a good way to keep up with the beat, to pull in new sources and stories, and to request information and raise concerns.
On a local amateur astronomy mailserver, for example, Sacramento Bee science writer John Cox noticed several references to the name of a Silicon Valley refugee living up in the Sierra Foothills known for discovering comets from his backyard telescope. Cox interviewed the guy and wrote a feature story.
Stephen Hart wrote an entire book beginning with a mailserver. Hart contacted a researcher, who kindly posted a query for him on a "closed" animal behavior discussion group the scientist moderates. Hart also posted a query on ProfNet, which helps reporters find expert sources by posting media requests several times daily to more than 800 member universities and other institutions. Hart received dozens of e-mail responses and made the vast majority of his source contacts by e-mail, accumulating more than 600 e-mail messages in his animal communication mailbox by the time the book, The Language of Animals, was completed two months later.
After David Lewin, staff writer for the Journal of NIH Research, joined a closed, moderated ethics mail list suggested by one of his sources, he found a good story from a discussion among people who sat on institutional review boards who had reviewed and turned down requests for trials of schizophrenia drugs that used placebos, despite a green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A particle physics newsgroup gave Kim McDonald, science reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the scoop on the top quark story. He found many details posted by a graduate student who had attended a seminar. He got the full story by calling people who talked to him with the caveat that he not break the embargo. McDonald had everything he needed days before The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune broke the story. He had neither the intention nor-with the Chronicle's weekly schedule-the opportunity of not honoring the usual embargo restrictions.
The Internet can be a strange and unfriendly place, says Oakland Tribune Investigative Reporter Paul Grabowicz, who also teaches computer-assisted reporting at UC Berkeley's graduate journalism school. A few simple guidelines can make the experience more pleasant. He recommends that any message you post employ neutral language and even apologize in advance for any possible misconceptions. Identify yourself in your message. Reread before you post; messages live a long time in cyberspace and you never know who might be reading.
If you get "flamed," or insulted, Grabowicz suggests, suffer silently and move on.
When you venture in with a message, stay on the topic of the mailserver. DON'T SHOUT (USING ALL CAPITAL LETTERS). If you need to emphasize a word, put an *asterisk* on either side of the word. Ask for help only if you really need it. Don't quote without permission. And don't plan to use this technique on deadline.
Evaluate the source of information before you use it, even as background research. Verify the data, information, sources and credentials-especially if it is critical to your story. While any professional writer takes those precautions, they hold especially true for all Internet information. It's easy to fake e-mail, put up a phony Web page, or circulate false rumors. "Just because we got it from cyberspace, put it in our computer and have a nice-looking printout, it doesn't mean we can trust the information," Wendland writes.
Wendland reminds his readers when a prankster posing as Timothy McVeigh posted a profile on American Online under the name "mad Bomber" and had said on-line that his favorite pastimes were "hanging around with my Michigan militia pals" and "blowing things up." A big network prime-time national news magazine "broke" the story, claiming an exclusive. Although a closer look would have revealed the profile had been posted two days after McVeigh's arrest, wire services, television and radio stations reported the McVeigh on-line post as genuine.
Getting Started
There is no substitute for getting on-line and poking around for yourself. Take some time to explore. If you're not on the Internet, try it out at a library, a university, a friend's house. Ask colleagues about their favorite on-line resources. Find out when journalism groups or media in your area are holding Internet training sessions. Ask your local computer nerd to show you how to set up your own Web page. Learn it and use it, because it's not going away.
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Carol Cruzan Morton is an independent science journalist who has been following advances in computer-assisted reporting since the late 1980s. She also works as a science & technology writer at UC Davis. She can be reached at ccmorton@nasw.org.