New Tools To Track People Down

Via Lifehacker. One of the tedious parts of being a journalist is finding ways to track down the people you want to talk to. Lifehacker puts together a nice little 101 on how to find folks beyond merely googling them.

If you don’t feel like visiting the link, here are the highlights:

• To find a person’s home address and phone number: Try Zabasearch. This is a search tool that can be done on a state-by-state basis, e.g. John Smith, Anytown, Mass. It also pulls up birth date information, although sometimes it’s conflicting. I use this tool often to track down the home addresses and phone numbers of businessmen and businesswomen I write about — particularly when their PR flacks and secretaries give me the runaround.
• To find background on a person: Try Pipl. This is a tool I haven’t tried much yet. You need the name and city address for a person you are looking for to make it work best.
• To find out what a person says about himself on social networking sites: Try Wink. Once you know the name and address of the person you’re tracking down, see if he is a member of any social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn. A lot has been written about the info on these sites damaging people’s job prospects. But in researching the backgrounds of alleged criminals, it can be a gold mine. I know a certain reporter who found this type of tool very useful when breaking a story about a high school teacher who had sex with a teenage student: Sure enough, the teacher had a racy MySpace page, which was taken down the day after the story came out.
• If you’re a Firefox user: try the “Who is this person?” extension. This feature will allow you to instantly run a name through Google, Zabasearch and a few other sites. Could be useful, but I prefer doing these by hand.

Boston University’s Strange Journo-Marketing

I just got around to sorting some of the mail and magazines on my desk. I was reading through the most recent issue of Bostonia, which is the alumni magazine of Boston University. There is a profile of WBUR, the NPR-affiliate based at B.U. At one point in the piece, the writer makes this awkward reference to an alumna, considering the story is running in a combination marketing and journalism mag.

As recently as two years ago, newspaper stories about WBUR described the station as troubled. They noted its growing debt to BU and the cancellation of The Connection, then the station’s flagship program, with a huge national following. Prior to that was the October 2004 resignation of longtime general manager Jane Christo (CAS’65) amid accusations of mismanagement, many eventually deemed not credible by a BU investigation.

Does that strike anyone else as weird, knowing this is a puff piece promoting B.U.? I can’t quite decide if it’s very bad marketing or very good journalism.

[BTW, the things an internal investigation found that Christo did were not all that interesting.]

Simile For The Chimera

Similes bedevil me. I have been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to ponder a meaningful or poetic manner in which ignorance is like a raven, greed is a like a clock and integrity is like a nail.

These, friends, are some of the similes created especially for me by the simile of the day generator I just found. A new, meaningless simile appears every time you click a button.

The Lede Is The Thing

Has anyone checked out this One Sentence project? It’s pretty nifty — people trying to tell stories in one sentence, some of them quite swell. None are really quite stories, but quite a few would make interesting ledes to stories.

Some of my favorites from today:

• “I realize now that his being a passionate person is no excuse for him trying to choke me to death when he found out i was pregnant.”
• “Eyeing the intriguingly attractive girl in line, it took me a moment to remember that it’s almost impossible to find lesbians in birth control clinics.”
• “To think… it all started with a wayward icecube.”