NewsBeat

December 2018 NewsBeat 7 • Google advanced search • Image search in Google or TinEye • Other search engines: Instya (mulitple searches at once), DuckDuckGo (won't track your IP or search history) • The Wayback Machine • Vin Place for vehicle ownership information • Million Short removes the most popular web hits • Deep Web Search Tools: FamilyTreeNow, Pipl, 123People, SamePoint, IceRocket, PeekYou, SocialMention, Whostalkin, That'sThem Business, property and politics: • Corporationwiki and state business records • State and local property search • Professional licensures with your state (teacher, lawyer, pilot, cosmetoglogy etc) • Who is behind a website? • Public information free search • USAspending: government contract information • Federal and state political contributions • Legistorm: Look up lots of info on members of Congress Social media: • Twitter history: Snapbird and Foller.me • Politician deleted tweets: politiwoops • Using Geolocation: Geofeedia, Banjo • Facebook graph search, IntelTechniques • MySpace • Crowdfunding: GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, Fundly, GiveForward • Craigslist (for cell numbers) General backgrounding tips 1 Stay organized! As you search, log all the records you find in a spreadsheet, noting date, address, description, notes, connections, source, link, etc. Print electronic files to a pdf and keep in a folder on your computer. Print paper copies and keep in an accordion file. 2 Verify all information. Go to primary source documents to cq information found on the web or in news accounts. 3 Expand your search: Background relatives and business associates. 4 Think outside the box: Obituaries, marriage and divorce records and other civil filings can be great places to find relatives and property or personal details. Voter registries typically include birth dates and addresses. 5 Keep the information coming: Create Google alerts or IFTTT recipes to alert you of any activity. Use Who is John Doe checklist at Reporter.org for more details Cheap or free tools and resources for newsrooms Documents DocumentCloud: uploading, annotating, analyzing and embedding documents Overview: help analyze tons of documents CometDocs or Tabula: converting pdfs into data Data & visualization Google Fusion Tables: point maps or heat maps, easily embeddable Tableau Public: (or Desktop, free to IRE members): sophisticated visualizations with no programming necessary TimelineJS: convert a spreadsheet into an interactive timeline StorymapJS: convert a spreadsheet into an interactive map OpenRefine: clean large data sets more quickly and easily Public records cheap Ask to inspect, not for copies Ask for information in electronic format (Excel, text for data, pdfs for documents) Appeal high costs (greater than .25/page) or excessive staff time Write about the costs Free resources Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: legal defense and FOIA hotline Data Journalism Handbook free tolls Free tolls for data viz (Sharon Maclis, ComputerWorld) NICAR18 slides, presentations and tutorials IRE18 slides, presentations, tipsheets — Reprinted from Lion Publishers Backgrounding Checklist Searching for people and information:

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