More about adding expertise to your posts
A lot has been made about the bad information on the web. Our goal is to provide good information, expert information. Journalists are seldom experts. They are story-tellers. They know how to put information together from various sources to create the story. The information may be buried in a government web site or the findings of an advocacy group. The journalist breathesnew life to that information by putting it in a context that people want to read.
Readers are starved for expertise. Possibly you saw the recent story of the UH blogger last week. He had posted a opinion about the release of a helicopter gunship video of the shooting a several people in 2007, including a two Reuters journalists. The guy’s usual postings are about his classes, what he did on his weekend in Austin, etc, but this posting went viral, as the saying goes, because he had considerable experience reviewing such video tapes. He argued that the WikiLeaks version of the tape misinterpreted what happened. Newspapers picked up on the posting, and before long he had a brief moment of fame.
The professional witness is one kind of expertise.
But there are others. The government, for example collects lots of great information in the census. This year’s census will be a mine of information. Texas government has a wealth of information in its websites. The state was an early adopter of posting public information. In that respect alone, the Internet can be said to be transformative of government and citizens rights to know.
For the Houston Area, check the Houston Area Survey. The results of the new survey will be released Wednesday.
For academic sources, check the Communications Virtual Library.
See if you can amass a library of links about your topic, and give some indication of what the links offer. There might be a dozen or more groups that maintain useful websites.
Check out the think tanks, such as the Pew Center for Research. This site has great research on public opinion. But it also has
