What we learned from Cheryl Phillips

I'm way late on sharing what all of you said about our guest speakers so far. Here are the "Twitter" posts you did on Cheryl Phillips from The Seattle Times. And thanks again, Cheryl.

Coming soon: What we learned from Maureen.

Here are the Tweets:

In today's class you have changed my view towards search engines. You taught me to search data that was not caught by google."

Start offline .Once online get a strategy & get organized!
Don’t throw darts @the WWW & don't forget the invisible web. Dive
deeper.

Ask for e-copies of federal or public documents or review them before asking for print copies. There's no substitute for talking to/interviewing people.

Search invisible web by using special links, a natural language search engine or “way back” machine which takes snapshots of previous sites!

Most of the information on the Internet isn’t available through a single, direct search, even using Google.

RE: S. Palin’s Alaska property  “ I wonder what she can see from here.”  My guess: Russia. Thanks for teaching public records to us!

Google isn't the end-all resource for online research, only the start. The great info is found in other sources, you just have to find them.

Online information below the top of the Internet, searched with
structure, is best. Curated sites, databases, and .gov sites are most helpful.

No substitute for talking to people!! Know what you are after. Bookmark and organize into subject folders & sub folders

There’s a place that even Google can’t find; the deep and invisible web where firewalls and intranets hide information that’s found only by those who know how to look.

Be curious and persistent - the amount of information available to you is astounding if you know where to look, and how long to look for it.

Exhaustive research, exhaustively catalogued, supports factual writing.

Good research means you scour multiple search engines. Be aware of the invisible web. Google and Yahoo, like our brains, use less than 10% of available data.

I have been an internal person. Cheryl showed an example of full worldly engagement, and the courage to do so with the joy of leaning in.    

Be tenacious. Her advice was to ask for what you want and if you don't get it, ask again. If you still don't get it, change the way you are asking for it.  This is relevant to interviewing subjects as well as researching information. Though the Internet is a valuable resource, not all data will be readily available. Pursuing answers and information efficiently is part of the challenge inherent to research and reporting. 

Most critical thing I heard from Cheryl was her focus on exhaustive research, exhaustively catalogued and organized, in order to support factual investigative reporting.  Especially as it seems she might often research more than one complicated story at a time.