NYU Journalism Toolbox (Bobst Library)

In this workshop we looked at RSS Feeds, Del.icio.us, and Zotero. If you missed the workshop, the presentation is available here.

More info (especially on Zotero) will be forthcoming!

Use these tools to track what’s happening in Congress. Most sites offer an RSS feed.

OpenCongress.org
From the Sunlight Foundation “OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.” View bills, senator profiles, issues, and more.

GovTrack
Info about the United States Congress. Includes info on status of federal legislation, voting records, and other congressional data from official sources. Provides email updates and RSS/Atom feeds for all aspects of Congress. Search bills by name, number, and subject, and can track bills . The full text of legislation shows the changes made to the bill.

MetaVid
“Metavid is a project which seeks to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective [re]mediation of legislative proceedings.”

I’d like to bring the library to the Journalism Department, so I’m starting to plan a series of quick sessions or workshops that would take place in the Journalism Department.  These workshops would be 45 minutes or so long, and focused on a specific information need or skill (How do I find x?).  I have a few ideas, but I need your input.  What questions are you struggling with? What additional research skills do you need?

If you have ideas, please leave a comment.

Here are a few good sources for ethics:

Poynter Media Ethics Bibliography
Provides a list of web and book resources covering media ethics.

Indiana University School of Journalism: Journalism Ethics Cases Online
Provides example cases.

American Society of Newspaper Editors: Codes of Ethics
Links to codes of ethics for many newspapers and affiliated associations.

Finding Articles

Search these two databases for articles:

Communication and Mass Media Complete
Communication Abstracts

Finding Books

Search BobCat for the following subjects to find books on journalistic ethics:

Journalistic Ethics
Mass Media-moral and ethical aspects

Narrower terms
Attribution of news
Confidential communications
Journalism objectivity
Newspapers objectivity

Tutorials

• LexisNexis Tutorials
  These tutorials and handouts are from LexisNexis, and somewhat general.

Searching Sources

• Learn how to search a specific source in LexisNexis
  Just want to search the Village Voice, but don’t know where it lives in LexisNexis?
• Learn how to search a group of sources in LexisNexis
  Want to search entertainment stories? This shows you how.
• Learn how to search sources by state in LexisNexis

LexisNexis Commands
(A shortcut list from LexisNexis is available here: LexisNexis Commands)

!
Ex. immigra! finds immigrant, immigrants, immigration, etc.

W/2
Ex. immigrants w/2 (new york)
Finds any articles that include both the words immigrants and new york within two words of each other. Good for increasing relevancy. NOTE: you can use any number (w/2, w/12, etc.)
Especially useful when searching for names that may have different variants. ex. (Hillary w/2 Clinton will find Hillary Clinton, Hillary R. Clinton, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

atleast5
Ex. atleast5 (barack obama)
Finds articles where the phrase/name “barack obama” occurs at least 5 times; the idea here is that if the name occurs at least 5 times, hopefully the article is about him instead of just including random mentions of his name. NOTE: you can use any number (atleast2, atleast10, etc.)

A complete list of search connectors is available here.

Searching within Document Sections (Byline, Body, etc.)
Want to just search for articles by a specific writer (byline)? Just interested in seeing results from the headlines?
Here’s a video that shows two different ways to search by section: LexisNexis: Searching by Document Section

Searching Sections
Want to search for your terms in a section of a story? Use these shortcuts below in your search.
TIP: A great way to increase relevancy is to search for your terms in the headline or the hlead (headline, lead paragraph)

Ex: headline(barack obama)
headline
hlead
body
lead
byline
length (length should be used with a >, =, or< sign.)