Coming back to reporting after several years of editing, I cannot remember how I ever managed to do a reporter's job without using online services. Certainly, I was nowhere near as fast and thorough, and my stories were nowhere near as deep and broad. And I'm not talking hard news or investigative stories here; I'm talking features. Example: a restaurateur in Ohio sues some guy for welching on a reservation.
Breach of contract, he argues. Not so, the welcher says, there was no contract. But there was, wasn't there? Whether or not a restaurant reservation is a legally binding contract is for the courts to decide, but there is no question there was a social contract, a promise which basic etiquette requires us to honor, and, if we cannot, to have the courtesy to cancel. My editor asked me to turn around a quick story exploring the issue of social contracts and the question: what does it say about our society when people feel they have to go to law to enforce the social contracts people used to honor out of common courtesy?
Since this was a question that touched on issues of law and social psychology, I crafted a quick query which I sent out on ProfNet. "Help!" I said, "I need experts on this question." Forums: "Anybody out there heard of any similar instances of this sort of thing?" Then left an open message on the CompuServe Legal and Social Issues. While my bait drifted in the electronic current, I did some old-fashioned reporting too: Got the number for Judith Martin, for example, and arranged a phoner; hunted down a newly-wedded couple (from the wedding announcements in our own paper) to ask them about RSVPs (another good example of a social contract); dropped into the local bookstore and picked up a copy of Rousseau's "The Social Contract" and read it again for the first time since college.
When I went back to check my lines, I had some bites: A couple of social psychologist types ready to talk to me about the main question, and an intriguing note from a lawyer on the Legal Forum. "There was a case, I think it was in Florida a few years ago," he wrote. "Where a mother sued her daughter's prom date for standing her up." He couldn't remember anything more about it, but that was all I needed.
Online again, and a quick dip into the electronic archives of the Miami Herald, searching on the words "lawsuit" and "prom" and BINGO! I've got two stories on the case. I interview Miss Manners et al., and I'm ready to write. My story on the role of etiquette in holding together the social fabric and these signs of its deterioration was picked by the L.A. Times-Washington Post Wire and run by papers all over the country.
And I can only wonder how I ever could have done it without the use of online information services. How long would it have taken me to find the people I needed to talk to and the information I needed? There is no question in my mind I would not - within the bounds of my deadline, anyway - ever have found much of it. There is hardly a story I do that I don't use my modem. It's like having a giant library-telephone directory at your desk, with information available to you almost instantaneously.
And people! You can find experts in everything from American Indian iconography to the language acquisition of children to modern tattoo ology. No matter how arcane your subject, somewhere out there there's somebody who's made a study of it, or, if not, at least has enough knowledge of related subjects to give it some intelligent perspective. Many reporters I talk to say they think using ProfNet is somehow cheating; it makes it too easy to find the right person to talk to.
But there is an art to the query, as it were. You must make it as precise (and concise) as possible and make clear how close your deadline looms. Then, when you put the query on the net, it goes to hundreds of institutions where flaks cull through their staff lists for someone who might be a good match, and sometimes they stretch things a bit, so you have to do some culling yourself. And as for tracking down non-academic people, when you have only a bit of information about them, online services can't be beat.
For example, when I recently had to locate the "Worm Woman of Kalamazoo" for a story I was doing on vermicomposting, I had only to go to Compuserve's Phone-File and search on her last name, Appelhof, in the Kalamazoo area to get her number and street address. When I recently did a story on the human vomeronasal organ and pheromones, I dipped into the National Library of Medicine to pick up the dozen most recent articles on this and related subjects in the medical journals (and with them the names of researchers, of course).
Sure, I could have gone to a library and spent a day digging for this stuff; instead, I spent less than 5 minutes and never left my desk. Other people at my newspaper have dumb terminals on their desks, which allow them to do nothing but write stories on the system. I have a PC, with a modem, which allows me to travel the world. Here's my list of most used online resources. These are all sources I use virtually every week, without leaving my desk.
All I simply do is dial into the local access number for Compuserve. 1) ProfNet. Need to find an expert on Civil War memorial statuary? Or the TV habits of blacks and whites? If there's anyone out there who knows about these things, a query to ProfNet is your fastest way to track him or her down. (See also Dissertation Abstracts below.) 2) Phonefile. Every listed phone number in the United States is at your fingertips in instants.
If you only have a hunch as to the general geographic area your subject inhabits, you can simply search by surname. 3) NewsUSA or the Newspaper Library. Electronic morgues of all the major and a lot of smaller newspapers across the country. Searchable by subject, keywords and byline. 4) Dissertation Abstracts. If you want to find out whether anybody has ever written a dissertation on the skateboard subculture, the abstracts will tell you who did when and give you a summary of the thesis.
Also, there's an order number, so you can get a copy of the whole thing if you want it. 5) Books in Print. Has anyone ever written a book about your subject? This gives you all the information including author, title, publisher, and ISBN number. 6) Magazine Database Plus. Many major and not-so-major magazines and their articles. 7) Academic American Encyclopedia. This may sound like a silly one, but it's handy to be able to look up some general point of reference quickly.
And, needless to say, it's also much faster than walking back to the library and searching through the dusty stacks. 8) SIGs or Forums. There are dozens of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and professional forums where people correspond on their subject, be it lawyers or dinosaurs. These are good places to find people to talk to about the subject you're writing about. You can contact Kenton Robinson at his CompuServe address, 75050,2773.