The American Press Institute offers an online research tool for reporters. The Toolbox helps covering news, business, sports, science, technology, crime, etc. and provides links to journalism job sites, online discussion groups and databases.

Its sections contain a variety of useful sites for inspiration and reference when writing a story. A few examples are labor issues, urban legends and consumer scams, such as Mouse Print, a consumer education site that exposes lies in advertising. Another section focuses on issues of people with disabilities, in an effort to get over prejudices and misconceptions increased by the media.

College and high school students will find help for researching papers and reporting under Reporting/Interviewing Techniques and Tools. The Nieman Narrative Digest is a large database of narrative journalism samples searchable by dates, source, topic and format, and the New York Times’s Interviewing Techniques contains suggestions to be able to put a high-quality student newspaper on the web.
The NYT’s guide starts with a quote from A.J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”, and emphasizes the fact that things have changed in a world of do-it-yourself publishing. 

In this comprehensive and regularly updated collection of Journalism Tools there is a part dedicated to US Politics and Elections. It features “The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004”, an online video archive presenting more than 250 television commercials from every election year beginning in 1952, when the first campaign ads aired, up to 2004.

Besides a database of political groups, other interesting websites are NewsMeat, which tracks celebrity donations to parties, candidates and special interest groups from 1978 to present, and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Developed by the Syracuse University, this research centre has as its core purpose to make information about the federal government’s regulatory effort more accessible to the public.

After digging deep into the sections of the Toolbox, we suggest to browse the “Just for Fun” page which features a collection of “cool sites for funny, offbeat web tools” like Happy News, a website that, for a change, focuses only on positive news. Finally, take the quiz of British Channel 4 “Worst Jobs in history” and find out that, after all, you should be rather happy with your current life, as you could have been a leech collector in the Middle Ages or a Victorian rat catcher.

E. Delaini

Published: April 14, 2007