The News That You Can Use
My education in research began in black and white. In between metaphor rich narration and a body, the detective would begin his case. And at some point, he would work his contact at Daily Gazette. Ace Reporter wouldn’t know the answer, but he’d see what was in the morgue.
Scene. Detective in a shadow filled office. Bottle in desk drawer. Manilla envelop with Detective’s name. He unwinds the red string. Taps. Pieces of newsprint drop out. Perhaps he uses his magnifying glass to read the clippings. What happened to water rights 30 years before. When Ace Reporter went to the morgue, it was not to look at dead bodies. Rather dead stories. Or as we would call it now. A Nexis search.
Going through the news, checking the archives is one of the best ways to gather information in business background research and many other assignments. Essentially, we’re hoping others already did our job. The biggest advantages of getting your material from old news clippings is firstly, you no longer need Ace Reporter contact at the Gazette to run to the morgue; you can search 1,000’s of articles across 1,000’s of publication, across, if not 1,000 years, at least 20 or 30 years these days (or more). It is easy to probe (if potentially time-taking to read wha is found). Secondly, if anyone challenges you as to how you know, you just say, it was in the news.
Yes, there is an issue with fake news. And there has always been questions of shilling or trade journal articles that are meant to please advertisers. News has never been perfect. Still, what about things published in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal; aired on ABC, and again, it’s not like there are never, ever errors in the best of edited sources. I mean let’s be a little more nuanced.
How to Parse the News
Matt Tait is an information security specialist, with a high profile Twitter account called Pwn All the Things. He posts on a variety of topics within the realms of cyber and information security, but recently he went directly at our ability to use the news. Since Twitter is 240 characters of stuff, he linked together several “tweets” in a “thread” on the idea to “learn to parse news stories carefully.” Specifically, he uses the recent brouha over an incendiary article published by Buzzfeednews and a subsequent article reported in the Washington Post (linked via Daily Herald to avoid paywall). The Post article contained contradictory reporting to the Buzzfeed story. Tait lays out both simple and complicated ways to examine each seemingly objective article. The easy ways, he shows how to parse out the article to understand its sourcing and where what came from; the more complicated answer is know background on the reporters in question, the reporters known sourcing or bias—it does not apply just to political reporters; take sports reporters, some are known to be team friendly, some player orientated, some associated with an agent, etc. You can get the details by following his thread. The bigger point is that finding something in the news is just the start of your research job.
What Comes Next
And what happens after the article was written. It’s not just that you get different stories based who the reporter’s sources are. These days, facts unfold and unfold again. Take another heavily reported happening, a weekend encounter in Washington DC. This is a highly politically charged issue, and one that demonstrates how one’s beliefs and convictions defines how one views the news, but that’s not my point. Rather, just the idea that you should never stop with one article. An arrest reported. Trial? Conviction? Appeal? Exoneration? To the extent possible, try to explore all the events reported on an incident.
News You Can Use
As the above examples show, it can be hassle to know if your article means anything. So, here’s a couple of other tricks us researchers use to see how much we should rely on what we see in the news. One of my favorite tactics is called find the release. That is, many things you see in the news begin as press releases. Just like us business researchers are waiting for reporters to get there first; some reporters are waiting for PR flacks to type it first. In your searching, you may find both an article and a press release. Compare to the two. What facts were added, or better, were any facts added. Another trick, when faced with multiple articles on a similar topic, reverse “edit-neer”, as I like to say. Put your self in a copy editor’s shoes. Think the basic questions he or she would ask, especially the who/what/where/when that forms the basis of journalism. How do the competing stories answer those questions. See the difference and you can see the perspective of the person who wrote it.
From Sam Spade to me, we’ve been relying on what’s been reported to help our cases. There can be articles based on detailed and well-funded inquiries. Whistle-blowers wanting to get their stories out via the press. The very fact that a company has been profiled, a variant of the any news is good news, means something. Yet, what it means is not always what is explicitly written. How did a story get built. Whose story is being told and why. And what happened after this story was told. Does the story hold. Some good examples on social media and such in recent days to help answer these questions.