Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Who needs morgue when there’s Google?

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

Searching the Internet can be a such a pain.

Maybe you’re looking for the perfect Christmas gift or a long-lost friend. Perhaps you want to commiserate with others about the Braves folding in the playoffs like another bad poker hand.

Can’t help you there. You can’t buy the perfect Christmas gift; I’m not the White Pages; and Personally, I’m glad the team is dropping some high-priced veterans this year, but don’t get me started.

If you want to find an article that was published in The Citizen in the past several years, though, I can help you. You’re gonna have to read a little further first. I’ve got white space to fill.

A while ago, our web site had its own search engine, but significant technical glitches cropped up and it was scrapped. This proved quite a challenge for many of us at the newspaper — we get several phone calls a week asking when a certain article or photograph was published. More often, I need a previous story to jog my memory about background information for a current story I’m writing.

Without the on-site search engine, finding an article is frustrating. Using the search engine for my computer’s hard drive is tedious at best. Since we often “slug” stories with a shorthand title, this can make searching far more difficult.

For example, a story on a city council meeting could be called, simply, PTC Council. If something more lively happened it might be slugged, “Mayor blasts away.” With only 16 to 20 characters to title our stories on the computer, we sometimes have to get creative.

Which means the search engine for my computer hard drive might find the story I’m looking for ... but it might not. Chances were kind of 50-50, particularly if I wasn’t quite so creative the day the story was written.

Thanks to Google, I can now search with confidence and generally find what I’m looking for right away. You need to type in a special search command after you type in your keyword(s) or key phrase.

Let’s say I want to find an article on The Citizen about the proposed Target for north Peachtree City. I would type in the following:

“Peachtree City”+Target site:thecitizennews.com

It’s important to note that there’s one space between your keywords/keyphrase and the word site. And once you type in site, you put a colon with no space between site and thecitizennews.com. You also leave off the www.

This Google trick also works for other sites but I find it especially helpful with dredging for articles from news sites. Always remember, the more specific (but brief) you are with your keywords and keyphrases, the more likely you’ll find what you want in the first place.

Back in the good ol’ days of newspapering, stories were “Googled” with your fingers in what was called the morgue. I’m sure it was named for the place stories go to die or some other clever reason, but the morgue was a great resource for editors and reporters needing background info or a good jog of the memory.

My former editor in Waynesboro at The True Citizen (a small-town weekly paper south of Augusta unrelated to The Fayette Citizen) kept his own morgue and as far as I know he still does.

Every Wednesday morning, without fail, Jimmy Ezzell would be at his desk, clipping articles and marking the date with an ink pen in the white space near the writer’s byline. The clippings would go into files in a four-drawer filing cabinet. Some folders would get pretty big by year’s end, like the Waynesboro City Council and Burke County Board of Education files.

Some folders were smaller, like the one for Mr. O.B. Poole, a local man in his 80s who was famous for running in long-distance events in the senior Olympics and also for growing rather large vegetables. One of my first photographs for The True Citizen was of Mr. Poole, who brought by samples of his large gourds to the office.

What was his secret? I really don’t recall. But I bet I could call Jimmy up right now and he could dig that photo and cutline out of his morgue likity-split.

Not as quick as I could Google, but almost. And certainly as reliable.