In the last Link of the Week, I described a few tips for hunting people down using the Swiss Army Knife of search engines, Google. This week, I want to mention a people-finder site that is more of a precision tool for the same job: Zoominfo.com.

The Zoominfo search engine is specifically optimized for extracting the names of people and companies, and attempting to thread all that information together to produce ad hoc sort of résumés for the individuals in its database. Zoominfo lets you search for names, companies, or jobs — and only those three things. You can refine your search by location, company name, and a few other parameters. In other words, it’s a good specialty tool for find people who have at least some business presence on the web.

Zoominfo’s system is far from perfect: Sometimes single individuals have several different entries, as if they were different people; sometimes various individuals with the same or similar name get smushed together into a single (confusing) entry; and many people don’t appear at all — especially those who haven’t built up web identities in the business world. But for what it is, Zoominfo is another handy tool for your people-hunting toolbox. And more to come!

One extremely common task for a reporter is tracking someone down, be they the subject of a story, a witness, an expert, a bad guy or whatever. I hardly need to say that the routine first stop in such a search is Google. But searching for individuals via Google is not entirely as simple as it seems, so this brief entry will offer a few tips.

Although I generally favor literal searches in Google (those “in quotes,” or with a hyphen-between-the-words) because they narrow down the results to the exact phrase you’re looking for, they don’t work as well with names. That’s because the name of a single individual can appear in many different formats: Tim Curran | Timothy Curran | Timothy A. Curran | Timothy Augustin Curran | Curran, Timothy | Curran, Timothy A. | Timmy Curran… etc., etc., etc.

For this reason, I usually do name searches on Google using just the first and last name, without surrounding quotes. For this purpose, Google has most other search engines beat, because it does the best job of interpreting the query as a name, and returning results that include not just the name in the query, but all the likely variants as well.

In the case of very common names (e.g. “Mark Johnson”), it may be necessary to put the name in quotes, and to try a few variants. It also might be helpful to throw in a related search term or two (a job title, or city, or anything else likely to turn up in a description) that narrow the results. But in such instances, it is often helpful to try more ‘people’ specific search engines, about which, more in the next Link of the Week.

You may have thought I was slacking in my blog duties, or just forgot about you. But in fact, due to a big ‘oopsie’ by my web host, this blog and my web gallery have both been offline for the better part of a week. But now that they’re back in service, I will endeavor to catch up.

In my job, I’m a very heavy user of Google News. Sometimes I need to know whether a particular news source is among those feeding Google News, so that if it isn’t, I can visit/subscribe to that source separately.

Bad news: Google treats this information as proprietary. Good news: somebody else has compiled a list by analyzing a zillion Google news search results.

Newsknife, a New Zealand-based Google news ranking service, maintains what seems to be the most complete and up-to-date list of Google News sources. It’s not perfect–there’s a chance they’ve missed some, and any sources Google has dropped (or which have closed up shop) may still be on the list.

Another alternative, if you just want to confirm whether a known source is feeding Google News, is to do an advanced search on Google News, and fill in only the name of the ‘News Source.’ If there are any search results, Google (obviously) is using that source. If there are no results, then Google is probably not.

Many newsreaders, including some veterans, seem to think there is only one tool for emphasizing the important words in a sentence, and that is to punch them. That is, to make them louder. But if you’ve ever heard a radio newscast or TV news story read this way, you know that having the significant words punched the same way, over and over, can sound monotonous and robotic.

In fact, there are at least three other techniques skilled broadcast reporters or newsreaders can use to highlight important words. These tools also add variety, shape, and ‘music’ to a reader’s delivery. Besides amplitude (i.e. louder), there’s also pitch/stress (making your voice slightly higher and tenser), e l o n g a t i o n (stretching the word out a bit), and    pausing    (surrounding a word with slight pauses tends strongly to draw attention to it).

In fact, there’s also another kind of amplitude variation (besides, did I mention, louder?) that can be occasionally be used to emphasize a word. Some times lowering your voice can draw the audience in, and convey just the right note of intimacy or conspiracy.

Anyone have other techniques they use for emphasis besides those I’ve mentioned?

With almost every entry on this blog I toss around grammar jargon like they’re working overtime at the factory. Most of it is stuff you probably thought you were done with when you graduated middle school. But, oh no, here it is again… and related to something you should know in order to make a living in newswriting. I bet you didn’t count on that when you flushed your mental cache around the time you graduated from college.

So for those who need a very condensed but readable guide to basic English grammar–technical terms and all–here’s what I use to double check my hazy recollections: Grammar Topics.

There are a thousand similar pages on the web. I happen to like this one (from the University of Victoria, British Columbia web site) because it’s very concise, correct (as far as I can tell), and from an academic (i.e. reasonably authoritative) source.

I haven’t forgotten my responsibilities here. It’s just that last week was a total bear as we tried to push a special commemorating Sirius OutQ’s Fifth Anniversary out the door. The special, “Sirius OutQ News: Five Years in Review” debuts today, Monday, from 5-7pm EDT.

As the title suggests, it’s a 2 hour review of the biggest stories in LGBT News since Sirius OutQ went on the air on April 14, 2003: Same-sex marriage, gays in the military, gays in schools, the courts, Congress, state legislatures, religion and HIV/AIDS. It features the first-ever long-form reports by our correspondents around the U.S. and around the world (Many of whom are NLGJA members, by the way). Those keen to hear it but who don’t have a Sirius receiver can get a 3-day trial subscription at SiriusOutQ.com. Just look for the “Get a Free Online Trial” link at the right side of the page.

The special will repeat in the future, though the dates have not yet been set.

In American journalistic prose, to “table” a bill, amendment or other measure is to offer or propose it. But in British usage, to “table” a measure means to suspend consideration (i.e. to “shelve” it). In other words, “table” has more or less opposite meanings in the UK and America. Many an editorial ship has crashed on this particular shoal. Beware, and make sure that when you see this word, you know whether your source is British or American.

In an earlier entry, I recommended Yahoo’s online “precision tool” for converting foreign currencies. Today’s Link of the Week is more of a Swiss Army Knife for converting any kind of quantity into another. There are several of these conversion sites available on the web, but among those I’ve tried, Convert-Me has the most different measurement systems listed: weight, distance, length, volume, area, temperature, cooking measures, power, flow, speed, and on and on. It’s possible that another site I use, ConvertIt.com, might have even more different measures. But it requires you to specify the input and, optionally, output measures in a more free-form kind of way (i.e. “5 feet”; “inches”), which for some reason I find disconcerting. In fact, I probably use them both about equally.

Because the lede to a broadcast story (or any news story, for that matter) must hook the audience immediately, it needs immediacy.

In print and sometimes in broadcast feature stories, it’s possible to, as we say, ‘delay the lede,’ putting a grabby bit of character or narrative right up front. In that case, the what’s-new, who-what-when-where-why-how part of the story (called the ‘nut graf’ — really!) comes later in the prose.

But on my side of the street, where we do only spot news, the ‘nut’ must always come first. That is, spot news always ledes with the most interesting, compelling way of expressing what’s new-new-new about this story.

One tool for conveying immediacy that says to the audience, “This is new! Pay attention!” is the choice of verb tense. In general, you want to lede with the tense that gives the strongest feeling of immediacy consistent with what makes logical sense given the facts.

So here is my rough-and-ready guide to lede tenses, in descending order of preference. As previously noted, these are rules of thumb; your mileage may vary.

1. Present progressive tense: “Police are rounding up twenty-five members of an alleged gang…”
   This tense says the news event is happening right now; that’s as current as it gets. Notice that we rarely use the simple present tense (”Police round up twenty-five members…”); that would sound too much like a newspaper headline — telegraphic and just plain weird. Note also that the future tense is rarely used in a news lede (”Police will round up twenty-five members…”), because spot news is not much in the prognostication business. We leave that to tarot card readers and psychics.
2. Present perfect tense: “Police have rounded up twenty-five members of an alleged gang…”
   This is appropriate for something that happened in the recent past, and whose momentum, if you will, extends into the present. In the example, police just ’rounded up’ these alleged (always ‘alleged’) criminals, and still have them in custody.
3. Simple past tense: “Police rounded up twenty-five members of an alleged gang last week.”
   Use this tense when the event you’re describing happened at some point in the somewhat more distant past, and is over and done with. This is not the tense you really want to use, as it conveys a feeling of stale, old news. If a week has gone by and most of those gang members have already bailed out of jail, it’s probably the safe choice. But in many cases, so long as the event is in the recent-ish past and the situation thereafter has been more-or-less static, you can use the present perfect tense in your lede, then specifically name the day the event happened (using the simple past tense) further down in your script.

I’ve seen newswriters use all kind of other weird tenses in their ledes (e.g. the past perfect: “Police had rounded up twenty five members…”; or past progressive: “Police were rounding up…”), but as a rule, you want to stick to these three unless you have a good reason and understand what you’re doing.

One final note: I called this specifically a guide to lede tenses for a reason. Tense choice within the main body of the story is likely to differ depending on the narrative needs of the story. Do not feel that because your lede is in a particular tense, the rest of the story must follow.