{ "id": "2000-may-intranet-essentials", "slug": "2000-may-intranet-essentials", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-may-intranet-essentials.html", "year": 2000, "month": "May", "monthNum": 5, "headline": "Intranet essentials", "kicker": "CAR ON DEADLINE", "author_name": "Noemi Ramirez", "author_title": "", "affiliation": "IRE and NICAR", "summary": "This article explores the diverse ways newsrooms use intranets as research hubs, from tracking public records to storing training materials and commercial database links.", "keywords": [ "intranet", "research tools", "public records" ], "topics": [ "Journalism & Newsroom", "Technology", "Investigative Methods" ], "technologies": [ "Intranet", "Internet", "World Wide Web", "CD-ROM" ], "full_text": "And you thought of your company's intranet as a mere sophisticated version of the traditional office bulletin board? Not quite. An informal survey among Newslibbers – subscribers of the NewsLib discussion list who have had experience with developing an intranet at a newspaper or TV station – shows that intranets play an important and sometimes essential role in promoting CAR in the newsroom. Elisabeth Donovan, Research Editor at The Miami Herald, reports that the Herald's intranet, one of the first ones in the country together with the NeRD page of the News & Observer, \"started in 1995 as a collection of Web links on a file server.\" This static compilation of online resources, however, evolved into a more complex structure in January 1998. According to Donovan: \"That year we added several searchable databases, including voter registrations, city/county employee databases, etc.\" Having these data sets easily available and, even more importantly, sharing the input forms so that \"reporters on the project could track the people they were investigating\" was crucial in developing the Miami vote fraud project, which in 1999 won The Miami Herald its sixteenth Pulitzer Prize. Intranets, however, prove to be most useful for daily reporting, says Russell Clemings, a CAR reporter who has maintained the intranet at the Fresno Bee since 1997. Clemings, who highlights the importance of having a budget for keeping the intranet updated, says his newspaper's intranet helps reporters \"track down and background news subjects. The local contribution data, which goes back to 1992, is especially useful in covering development.\" Breaking news is a challenging situation for reporters, editors and researchers. Once again, a well set up intranet designed to meet the culture and information needs of its organization can make all the difference on deadline. Tom Boyer, research editor at The Seattle Times, recalls that when white supremacist Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr. opened fire at a Los Angeles day-care center on Aug. 10, 1999, his paper was a full day ahead of the rest of the country because of their people-tracking resources. \"We were able to identify the guy, found his family, friends and associates and found obscure court records on him in the first 12 hours,\" Boyer says. The Seattle Times' intranet, which started as a \"virtual Rolodex\" of staff phone numbers in 1996, has since then added dozens of public record databases including real estate, business licenses, drivers, voters, state licensing and campaign contributions. Boyer, whose plans to improve the intranet are focused on refining the interfaces to allow for simultaneous searches in multiple databases, concludes that because of their intranet \"we basically are going to have a significant home-court advantage on any story that involves public records in Washington.\" Newspapers are not the only medium that has taken advantage of the intranet technology. C.B. Hayden, director of research services at ABC News, says, \"The intranet has been the focus of our efforts to provide the highest level of research service to a large international news organization.\" Like many others, ABC's intranet grew out of a network of CD-ROM databases in 1998. Two years later, offering more than 50 different fee-based services and receiving 100,000 hits per month, the research staff uses the intranet in a sophisticated way to customize content from database providers. Dedication, purpose and enthusiasm are keys for the success of the intranet project at ABC. \"Every day we are making decisions on how to develop it,\" Hayden says. \"We find that there seems to be no end to the creative ways we could use it.\" What does an intranet need to become the foremost research tool in your newsroom? Here you have a few suggestions offered by members of the NewsLib listserv: In-house archives: Text archives, live and archived photo systems, internal databases like celebrity or experts contact information, link collections of online resources organized by beat and category. Training materials: Instructional cheat sheets on how to use public records, online databases, or file a FOIA request. Databases of public records: General databases like death records, vital statistics, voter registration, campaign contributions, cars, driving licenses, business licenses, property records, real estate. Beat-specific databases like workers' compensation, city/county/state employees and salaries, inmates, aircraft, government aerospace data. Commercial resources: Lexis-Nexis Universe, Dialogselect, Wilson Biographies, Gale Biography Resource Center, Facts on File, Keesing Records of World Events, InfoUSA, Bell & Howell Proquest, Encyclopedia Britannica, Hoover's, Merlin, CD-Law Legal Research, Autotrack, Public Records Online. Other research resources: Percentage calculators, weights and measures converter, zip-code directory, phone and reverse phone directories, online searchable AP stylebook. Company information: Daily announcements, research request forms, expense forms, job requisition and evaluation forms, letterheads, phone and e-mail staff directory, staff schedules, conference room scheduler, job postings, bulletin board for staffers to post things for sale and, just for fun, softball league team rosters! Feedback: Design critique, best headlines of the week, tips, help documentation. That's not bad for a start, is it? So next time you need to turn to the Internet to get some data, think twice. Maybe the answer is right under your nose or, better said, under the firewall of your Intranet.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "pre-v2", "extracted_at": "", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1998-april-tech-tip-enter-intranets", "score": 0.25 }, { "slug": "2002-mayjune-intranet-tools-and-preparing-for-disaster", "score": 0.248 }, { "slug": "2000-may-intranet-start-up", "score": 0.24 }, { "slug": "2000-may-using-newsroom-intranets", "score": 0.232 }, { "slug": "2000-november-filemaker-intranet", "score": 0.198 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-may-intranet-essentials.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-may-intranet-essentials.json" }