(Click on photo to read the story)
You know you did a good job in your RW1 class when classmates ask you “How’d you find that” story?
Why, Google. Of course.
Here’s what went down:
I was assigned day reporter. Professor say to me “find some Chileans watching the mining rescue on tv. Maybe a bar somewhere in Brooklyn.”
See, we write for a site called The Brooklyn Ink, so we needs that angle to make sense. Normally, just a request from the editor gets the job done. But, he had to add “Show me your stuff,” at the end of the email. A challenge? What? To me that meant it had to be done. Didn’t matter that a majority of the Chileans in NY live and work in Manhattan or Queens. I Googled:
“Chile Brooklyn ” without the quotes and got this:
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Not what I needed. But my Google senses were telling me I just needed to dig a little deeper.
——-At this point I was really smelling myself. Now if you look closely, you see some patterns start to emerge. Name, locations, “lives in”. I continued this until I got to the nice young Chilena in the picture that ran with my story.
I’m learning more and more, journalism couldn’t exist without Google. It couldn’t. But that’s another debate and another post. I’m just glad I could contribute a little local connection for a story that caught the world attention, if only for a couple dozen hours.
channibalsmith.com 
Nice job. I’m often amazed that Googling skills, basic Boolean search concepts, still aren’t necessarily widespread in newsrooms. Not just the olds who didn’t grow up with computing. Younger reporters don’t necessarily get the concepts either, so it’s still a useful skill to have that can set you apart in the field.
Though the corollary is also true: Journalism can’t subsist on Google alone.
Touché.
“Journalism couldn’t exist without Google?”
Come on now, son.
It did and it does (the phone and local sources are your friends).
That said, I applaud your skills with the big G (but mine are unrivaled, and I’m what your friend Crayton might call “old”).
😉
Can´t front, good sources def. beat google. I think about it alot: once it´s on google it´s almost not news, unless you´re up for two days mining and get lucky. That happens to me every once in a blue. Gonna have to see how well this blekko handles it.