Whether they're writing about tax reform or not (and whether they think "tax reform" means avoiding a state income tax, or getting one), journalism students and citizen journalists alike will find an impressive set of research links at the Tennessee Tax Revolt Taxpayer Information Center.

The site's new "investigative reporting" section has links to national organizations that journalism students probably know about already. (Several are on my home page or show up during the year on my course pages.) However, I really like that section's two Google News "location" searches -- great for a class discussion of focusing a search with Boolean operators. Example:

location:tn (ethics OR corruption OR bribe OR fraud OR "Tennessee Waltz")

While we're there, I'll also be able to point out that Google News now lets you create an RSS feed of a search you want to have it repeat frequently. (New to RSS?)

Here's a search I have on my own RSS list to narrow the results when I'm not interested in celebrities and sports stories:

Knoxville "University of Tennessee" -"Johnny -Knoxville" -basketball -football -coach -athletics -golf

We can also discuss the shortcomings of such a search, which would miss crime or budget stories that involve athletes or coaches, and why a story about the Xerox Classic golf tournament slipped by that last filter today.

Next topic, feeds and breaking news: In the time it took me to type and post that last paragraph, the first item in the list changed from "Hubba, Bubba! Dickerson leads Xerox Classic by 1" to UT, Maryville College do well in US News rankings (WATE.com), announcing that UT moved up ten places in the annual magazine tally of colleges and universities -- to number 85 among 248 "national universities."

Hmmm. That story also will fit into later classes about statistics and surveys, and about differences between broadcast news, newspapers and news websites. For instance, if that "85" number in the TV story sounds low, it's because the "national" list includes well-endowed private universities, but TV has to leave out details. As the News Sentinel points out in its longer version of the story, UT is number 38 among 162 large public universities, and this is its first time in the top 40. (Here's the UT press release for comparison.)

The Web not only handles the News Sentinel's longer version of the story just fine, it can provide more. In this case, the newspaper's online edition, KnoxNews.com, did attempt to link to more US News & World Report information about the rankings, but two of its three links didn't work at first. I sent a note about the coding glitch to the webmaster at 12:45; it was fixed within the hour! I couldn't ask for a better example to emphasize that the Web can be updated during the day (unlike a printed paper) and (unlike radio and television) website problems can be fixed before everyone has seen or heard them. 

Back to the original subject of this post: Other resources on that "Information Center" page include links to Tennessee county and city websites, newspaper and television station websites, pages about public information laws, state economic data, and much more -- more than 700 links in all. Even as a long scrolling list with little information about each link, it's definitely worth the price of a bookmark.

Journalism students, however, had better learn to spell "muckraker" right.

11:26:14 AM  #