1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Online research and reporting 81
humanities and business through to health and science. So they
are useful for the early broad search.
However, sometimes you want to limit your initial search,
perhaps by country or by subject-matter. In that case, a restricted
area search tool can be a useful alternative. For example,
www.ukplus.co.uk is useful for UK-based material or ananzi.com is
valuable for South African web sites.
There are also search tools that concentrate on one subject area
only, for example:
www.findlaw.com, with a focus on legal matters; and
www.healthfinder.gov, which is a comprehensive site for health
information.
Subject guides
These are rather like the restricted subject area search tools listed
above. They are usually web sites run by individual experts in
their fields. They focus on a single subject and contain many links
to other relevant sites and some useful additional information,
comment and evaluation by the site provider. They can also put
you in touch with the best online discussion groups in their
particular sector (see ‘Mailing lists’ and ‘Newsgroups’ later in this
chapter).
Subject guides can be a valuable ‘one stop shop’ starting point
for reporters specializing in a certain field. But how do you find
them? You could look for them using a search engine or they may
even be listed in Yahoo! as individual entries.
But there are also some useful sites which act as clearing
houses and directories for specialist subject guides. They not only
group the subject guides together, but also evaluate them before
including them in their online directory. Examples of clearing
houses are:
Argus Clearinghouse (www.clearinghouse.net); and
WWW Virtual Library (www.vlib.org).
Some journalists and journalism schools have developed sites that
have become useful subject guides for reporters and researchers.
A few examples are: