Ready Reporter

A lot of the buzz at IRE was about the app ban.jo, which is a two-year old social media platform that combines Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest all together for quick review. It’s searchable and the best part — can be filtered by location.

“With ban.jo you can see what is happening in real time around the world or around the corner, ” explained Jennifer Peck, a Ban.jo employee who spoke at the IRE conference in June.

She explained that at the time of the Boston bombing, banjo users were able to filter out thousands of tweets, posts and pictures and find just the messages and photos from the finish line. And you don’t have to go to each of the four platforms as ban.jo brings them all together.

Obviously, ban.jo only picks up the location from those people who have their geolocation turned on, but Peck said that during Hurricane Sandy thousands of people posted details and photos from specific location.

Ban.jo could be very helpful to reporters:

• In breaking news situations to get information and photos when you don’t have reporters yet at the scene. See a post by reporter Andy Settler of “The Reporter,”(Penn.) explaining how he got quick, helpful information from ban.jo when the police scanner reported a bomb at the local mall
• When a national story breaks,  such as the recent plane crash in San Francisco, ban.jo staff will post a “tile”, folder, with content from the scene, updated in real time
• To gauge the fan sentiment at sports events and to see their photos.

Check back for posts later this week on how to connect with sources on ban.jo and cautions about making sure you check out the information you read there to make sure it’s valid.

If you’ve used ban.jo for reporting, I’d love to hear how it worked, below.

My mind is swimming with all I have learned at IRE. And I have a lot of apps, programs, websites to check out and tell you more about over the coming months.  Here are some of the top quick points from what I’ve heard:

1. Track key words in legislation at your state house and get alerts for those keywords via openstates.org

2. Sunlight Foundation, which runs #1 above, also has many websites to help you follow politics, track influencers of politics and even find deleted tweets from pols. For a list of all of them check out the Tools tab.

3. Three ways to verify a photo — use the camera icon at Google images and drag the photo in to see where it appears online; do the same on tineye.com or click on the photo settings and get the EXIF data which has latitude and longitude which you can put in Google maps.

4. New to an area and want some quick demographics to help you understand that neighborhood or city?  Download the sitegeist app.

5. You could spend days looking at all the business and economic data provided by the St. Louis Federal Reserve.  It’s called FRED.

More than 1200 journalists are in San Antonio for the annual conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors. If you’ve never been, put it on your list for June 2014 because you’ll learn a lot from reporters ready to share their inside secrets and best tips.

Here are five practical tips to help you be a better reporter:

1. Ryann Grochowski, from Investigative Newsource says four databases that every newsroom should have are:

• Voter registration files.  This helps in backgrounding people and confirming addresses.  Some states require phone numbers so it can be a great way of tracking down people, as well.
• Campaign finance data as a look up, to confirm addresses and see relationships
• Dog license database.  People who don’t give out their address or phone number elsewhere don’t want to find Fido when she runs away, so they keep their information current.
• Property tax records. Many counties put them online for searching.

2. Margot Williams of NPR says that you can track who in your area is applying for H1B visas and green cards by downloading the U.S. Department of Labor Emplyment an Training Adinistration. You won’t get names but you will get the company/individual names, the job titles and salaries.

3. To be a better searcher on Twitter filter for location. For example: Near:Detroit #arts within:10mi

4. ProPublica has cleaned up data and organized it to make it easy for you to use in stories for your local area.  Check out what it has for nursing home problems, doctors receiving payments from pharmaceuticals,  recipients of stimulus money and more.

5. Banjo is the “fastest way to get eyes on the ground” for breaking news, says Jennifer Peck of Banjo. It compiles postings/photos/info from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Foursquare that has a location to it. More on that in another post.

Sorry for the lack of posts — the professor behind Ready Reporter is teaching an intensive summer school course which is keeping her pretty busy.

But check back and you’ll see more here soon…

Ricin makes news on Wednesday, and now anhydrous ammonia on Thursday. Here are tips on how to search quicker,  better and smarter to get quick facts about those chemicals.

1. Don’t just plug terms into a search engine

That generally doesn’t give you the best sources. Often Wikipedia comes up high in the search results.  It’s good for some things, but not reputable on all topics. Other links that float to the top are likely for other news organizations. You want an original source.

2. Search a keyword or phrase at a site you know is reputable 

You might think that the Centers for Disease Control deal with health hazards and the EPA deals with environmental concerns. So go search tkeywords at those sites only. You can filter for just certain sites, rather than search the whole ‘net. Here’s the formula:  keyword site:domain. 

Example: ricin site:cdc.gov   or “anhydrous ammonia” site:cdc.gov

The first search nets this helpful page all about ricin.

3. Search the keywords at a government site

If you’re not sure whether EPA or which agency would provide information on   anhydrous amonia, but you want a government site, try this search: “anhydrous ammonia” site:gov

With that you’d get these top hits from Google:

• North Dakota state department of health
• CDC page written for those in  entertainment industry who might be writing about the chemical
• CDC’s the international safety card about the chemical

With the same search in Bing! you find:

• same North Dakota site
• a 2005 report from CDC about thefts and releases of anhydrous ammonia
• summary of the chemical from the Utah department of health

Bing! also gives you ideas of other common searches on the topic which provide you with another set of quality sites: