Human sources are still your best bet in most journalistic situations. So I am grateful to IRPC, employment lawyers and experts in health and safety matters, for offering their services to any JournoList reader who needs comment or guidance on new laws, employment stories and so on.
The firm is part of Croner's, who make those ring-bound handbooks to proper working practices. You can find quite a lot of interesting material on their site, including brief downloadable guides to proper employment practice and the legal dangers of using email in corporate life. Particularly chilling, that one. Or you can contact Clare Buckley at the firm. Her email is clare.buckley@irpc.co.uk, or you can use the old-fashioned telephone: 01455 894215.
I was also contated by the creators of Newsbooster, a news search engine based in Copenhagen. It is designed for business users and claims access to 3,000 online sources. I had a look and its coverage of Scandinavia is particularly impressive, as you might expect.
The site greets you with an invitation to register and subscribe, but you can use the basic news search service for nothing. Unlike Moreover, for instance, it doesn't limit the number of results you get back. Like all these sites, it won't always find what you want: you may need to use several of them during your search session. I find I use RocketNews and DayPop, because I like their simplicity and speed, and NewsNow, because it has the best British coverage. I shall add Newsbooster to that list. I have given up on Moreover, however; it buries its British sources and makes it very difficult to find anything relevant. Presumably it works better for paying customers.
The other side of Newsbooster is its subscription service. This allows you to keep your own searches stored on the site and then gives you alerts when those things crop up as it spiders the news sites. Ideal for businesses or for specialist correspondents needing to keep track of certain companies or products: but it will cost you 199 Euros a year. If you are interested in that kind of thing, you might like to try Northern Light's alerts service, which is still running despite the closing of its free public search engine.
As part of my campaign to look at all the web's journalism sites, I've been visiting FACSNET, which is a heavy-duty American site dedicated to raising the standard of journalism, and quite right too. There are lots of resources here, including some hefty subject guides. I started reading a guide to epidemiology -- we can expect that to feature heavily in the next few years, now people have gone off the idea of vaccination -- and it was very convincing and thorough. Possibly too thorough for those who are not specialists. But the site as a whole is well worth discovering.
For those who are interested in journalism in its Internet guise, there is plenty of provocative reading at the Online Journalism Review. That pointed me at a number of apparently very famous online publications that I had never seen before. I particularly liked Plastic: Recycling the Web in Real Time, which simply collects articles from around the world and presents them stylishly and with a slight humorous gloss. It's hard to see how that could represent a commercial publishing model: and from reading about the site on OJR that would seem to be its trouble.
And then there's Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc, another American organisation that takes itself very seriously indeed, which is at least partly explained by the fact that one of its founders was murdered by organised criminals. It's a membership organisation, open to anyone operating in the field of investigative reporting, and it keeps all its best stuff (contact lists and the like) for members. Not all its members appear in its directory, which may explain why it has only three in Britain, one each from the Guardian and The Times, and one from the BBC World Service. Some basic material is available from the site for nothing, but if you want more you'll have to join.
Meanwhile, anyone can use the resources assembled at Power Reporting. They're free, and there are no ads. This is another excellent American site and it deserves a good look.