Writers score with databases

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1989 by Margaret Hunter

Writers score with databases

The days of poring over reference books and newspaper indexes for story background may be coming to a close. With a computer, a modem and some training, a journalist can obtain, within minutes, a copy of today's frontpage story from the Brisbane (Australia) Telegraph, learn when news media began using the term "greenhouse effect," track trends in the nuclear waste industry, or find who recommends which Washington, D.C., restaurants.

Although database searching will never replace the traditional library, sources describe it as a powerful research tool that has revolutionized the quality, quantity and accessibility of information. "Once you start searching in databases you never want to go back," says Brad Schepp, associate editor of the Datapro Directory of On-line Services. "Somebody at Dialog [a a major database vendor] says a minute spent searching [databases] is equivalent to an hour spent in a library. I think he's being a little conservative."

Simply stated, a database is collection of information--lawsuits, newspaper and journal articles, directories, lists--that can be searched by a computer, usually through telephone lines, explains Jean-Paul Emard, vice president, Meckler Corp., publisher of Database Searcher magazine.

Databases not only pull together a remarkable quantity and variety of information, but can also locate it quickly, tap sources anywhere in the world, and, perhaps most important, index information by any relevant concept or criteria, according to Ted Miller, a New York-based writer and consultant who studied media use of databases as a research fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies in New York. For example, a searcher can scan Who's Who not only by a person's last name, but also by whether a person belongs to the Bohemian Club, as the San Francisco Chronicle did in 1987, Miller says. Among the Bohemians found: former Secretary of Defense and current Forbes publisher Caspar Weinberger.

The usefulness and power of database searching promise to become only stronger in the future. The industry is still in its infancy, sources agree, and will inevitably expand. "It's a total revolution in the way we obtain information," says Miller. "We have explored maybe 15 percent of potential."

Magazines already report using databases for a wide variety of tasks. Financial magazines, for example, report searching databases to keep up with companies' personnel changes and new products, to find out which board of directors an individual serves, to track an individual's career, or to locate former employees of a company. A wide variety of magazines use database searches to compile profiles of individuals before an interview, or to create detailed chronologies of complicated events.

Miller used a database to locate former law schoolmates of Geraldine Ferraro, who graduated from Fordham University in 1961. By cross-indexing a list of attorneys with the school and year, something that would have been impossible using a printed directory, he turned up several. One he called turned out to have been in Ferraro's study group. "She always sat in the front of the class," he told Miller, along with other details that fleshed out Miller's biography.

Untapped potential

Few journalists have begun to explore databases' potential, Miller says. "People still just look at it as a way of getting things faster," he says in frustration. An example of the kinds of manipulation databases make possible, he says, appeared in "The Bibliometrics of Politics," published in the fall 1988 Gannett Center Journal. Miller and David Stebenne used the Nexis database of Mead Data Central to scan The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Associated Press and nine other national news sources during selected periods of last fall's Presidential campaign to see how many times the Bush and Dukakis staffs were mentioned. The Bush team got 65 percent of the attention, compared to Dukakis' 36 percent.

"This result may stem from the public relations superiority of the Bush campaign team, but it also raises questions about the time-honored conservative myth of left-wing media bias, at least for the 1988 campaign," wrote the authors.

Of course, just getting information quickly and easily comes in handy too. Freelance political writer Marc Cooper routinely sets up an "electronic mailbox" when he begins a new assignment. He uses IQuest, a global gateway also called Easynet (see sidebar, page 134), offered on Compuserve. He sets up the mailbox, types in key words or concepts that relate to the story, and signs off. Several days later he goes online again to collect his "mail". Each day the computer has searched updated sources such as The New York Times, found any articles that contain the key words, and dumped them into a file for Cooper, who then copies the information onto his office computer and signs off quickly. Because many databases charge by the hour for connect time, this method saves Cooper money on search charges and hours of time he would have otherwise spent researching at the local library.