Producing Online News: Chapter Six

I learned a lot of little tricks in this chapter for when I’m doing research on the Internet (which is required for almost every story I will write). Placing quotation marks around the words you want to find on a page will limit the search to the exact order the words are in. Placing the minus sign in front of a word will exclude it from a search. For example, if you are writing a story about the average ACT score of a student at a Jesuit school, but you don’t want information about Marquette, you could search “Average ACT score at Jesuit schools –Marquette). This tidbit applies to Google searches. For more advanced search engines,  a different rule like writing NOT in front of it instead of a minus sign will do the trick. Another trick I learned is if you want to learn something exactly, try placing an asterisk in place of it. For example, if you wanted to quickly figure out what Obama’s middle name is, you could search Barack * Obama. Learning these little research tricks ensures your stories will be accurate but will also get put online or printed fastest.