I don’t think I finished explaining why the article by Weaver and Bimber about Google News and LexisNexis connects up with the learning goals for this class:
- It’s partly about Google. The more you know about Google and its many services the better you’ll be able to design a research question about Google for your final project in this class.
- The article exposes some of the inner workings of databases (specifically, LexisNexis) and search engines (Google), which will strengthen your overall understanding of the tools you use to find sources.
- The article is a nice model of a scholarly journal article, a genre of writing that is probably new to most of you but is one that you’ll need to become familiar with as college students working on research assignments throughout your years here at Baruch.
- The authors offer on page 519 three nicely crafted research questions that model what I expect of you for your final projects.
Weaver, David A., and Bruce Bimber. “Finding News Stories: A Comparison of Searches Using LexisNexis and Google News.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85.3 (2008): 515-530. Communication & Mass Media Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Aug. 2011.
This article was very useful in helping me understand some of the major differences between archives and web based news portals. With the omission of wire service content from archives such as LexisNexis, people were limited in the amount of stories that they were provided with, as well as the many different perspectives on certain issues that the web had to offer. Especially when most newspapers were beginning to lose revenues, and therefore new staff, wire stories were becoming more heavily relied on by the nation. Therefore it seems to me that although archives maybe a good/reliable source of news information, the web had outdone them by far.
sorry not just new staff, I meant to say newspaper staff in general !
It has come to my intention how important it is to have connections or not only sources accessible within arm-length distance, but to have a variety of sources including ones that require you to go the extra distance to obtain — by this, I was referring to wire stories. According to the article, LexisNexis and Google both have their ups and downs and proposed a traditional versus modern idea where LexisNexis and other services such as Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. provided a text-only format and offered old archives. On the contrary, Google was a modernistic version of LexisNexis with a compilation of news articles and stories from not only covering the nation but whole entire world. This may sound biased, but Google is in fact a global phenomenon as of the 21st century.
It has come to my attention* (THANKS NAF!)