Ready Reporter

Here are five more tips from the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference:

• In a breaking news situation, use life360.com to keep track of where all your reporters are and to keep them organized. Designed for families, but who says newsrooms aren’t a family?
• If you need a dictation transcription, check out Dragon Dictation app.
• Censusreporter.org is so much easier to use that the Census’ own Website for demographic information. Try it.
• While there is no easy way to track cell phones, spydialer.com is worth a try.
• When backgrounding people, try the search engine, Blekko.com, which pulls up content others don’t.

One of the best conferences each year is at the 2014 IRE Annual Conference. Here are five great tips I picked up last week:

• 1. If you need to search Instagram, try iconosquare.com
• 2. Trying to check family relationships from documents? Look for online obituaries which often have them
• 3. If you’ve used Guidestar to find 990s (non profit reports to IRS), then also try Citizen Audit, which has a search function
• 4.  In July you can track what candidates and others are spending to buy time for federal elections on politicaladsleuth.com.  It will cover every TV station in the country.
• 5. Need to scan a document for publication? Use CamScanner app, which also gives you options for editing and cleaning up a document.

I didn’t know that it wasn’t easy to email members of Congress directly or that most members don’t publish an email address. You have to go to their websites and fill out a form. Apparently one of the reasons is that they fear spam or mass emails from people outside their districts.

At the left,  here is the website form someone in Central New York must use to communicate with U.S. Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand.  It would be so much easier to keep her email in a contacts list and email directly from there.

Now the Sunlight Foundation has developed an easy way for citizens to email their representatives or senators, at its website, Open Congress. They search for their Congressmember and the email appears on the first page. I’ve circled it here: 

And even if, as a reporter, you generally go through the public relations staffers, you might want to let your readers, viewers and listeners  know of this easy way to let their voices be heard.  It’s quick!

One limitation that Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs,  notes,  “For now, our system will only let you email your own representatives. A lot of people dislike this. We do, too. In an age of increasing polarization, party discipline means that congressional leaders must be accountable to citizens outside their districts. But the unfortunate truth is that Congress typically won’t bother reading messages from non-constituents — that’s why those zip code requirements exist in the first place. Until that changes, we don’t want our users to waste their time.”