The Big Fish is Your Friend

I spend more time deleting the Google Alerts that I get than ever using what comes across the many emails each day. Of course, I want to be up on my industry and stay alert to trends and developments. Still, I confess that a lot of what I’m looking for is fodder to keep my social media feeds interesting. Occasionally, like today, I find a lesson to lend.

There are many times, when the only publications I will search for background are the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. No offense to the L.A. Times or anyone else doing great journalism, sometimes you only need to check three. Yet, there are many instances where it pays to check the smaller of papers.

I posted recently about how I found a Batman villain in the course of searching a small town paper. Something popped up today that reminded me of a key value of small town papers. It was a press release, but it was published in a regional newspaper—I’ll leave the specifics aside so you will not know who I’m monitoring. My point is that small town girl hits big is always news in said small town. What may be a run of the mill promotion in the Wall Street Journal can be front page news back home.A similar thing can happen with college papers or even high school publications. Such as it is, the smaller publication may run a press release that a bigger paper would ignore. Look where your subject is a big fish.

There are three ways to find “small town publications” —and small town publications can range from suburban weeklies to the daily paper for Yakima, Washington (the Yakima Herald if you care). First, many of these publications are indexed via Google/Bing or otherwise available via Nexis. That is you can find the articles as likely as you could in any big search. Second, the publication may be online but the archives may require a search via the site’s home page. This is the classic “invisible web”, where the material is public but not picked up by Google. Finally, there are publications that are not “online”. That is there are no electronic versions of the articles that can be remotely accessed. In that case, one has to try the publication itself, to see if they will review their archives for you, or you can visit a library in that town, which usually will have some form of back collection or index. In fact, in some towns, the library will make clipping files of their favorite sons and daughters. There is also newspapers.com and similar sites, which have scanned old newspapers—these sites are fascinating because you get the see things like old ads and old listings, things that Nexis does not include.

There’s a lot of value to getting Google Alerts, even if that value is reminding me of the value of small town papers. Remember where your subject is a big fish is a good place to find interesting material.