106 9.16 Private Sector Contributors
Maybe you are working as the corporate communicators specialist for a major business in your community and you need to determine how the CEO wants to position the decision to open a new factory overseas. Maybe you are producing advertising for your computer manufacturer client and you need to understand what types of ads have worked in the past. Maybe you are writing about a possible financial scandal at the non-profit foundation in your state that is supposed to help low-income residents gain employment skills. In each case, you want to interview the key people who work at those institutions to get the benefit of their expertise. For these examples, you know the name of the specific person or people you need to interview.
Other times, you may need to identify an appropriate private-sector institutional source who can speak knowledgeably about your topic or issue. Using some of the search tools mentioned here can help you identify the right person and prepare for the interview.
The Who’s Who volumes (Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the Midwest, Who’s Who in the Press, etc.) are sources of biographical information about an entrant. These are good resources only if you have a specific name you are looking for.
“Biography master indexes” can help you locate biographical information published in various books, magazines, and newspapers. These are valuable resources for communicators because they provide supplemental or supporting information about individuals beyond what you can get during an interview. If some facts have to be verified, if the person in question will not agree to an interview or is unavailable, these biographical references are often the only method for gathering the required biographical information. A resource guide to biographical sources in the UMN library can be found here.
Hundreds of online news sites and news indexes can help you locate background information about possible interviewees. The powerhouses of news searching have been the large commercial database services such as Newsbank, Proquest Dialog, LexisNexis or Factiva. These provide cross-title searching of multiple news organizations’ materials – for a fee. These large subscription database services are best accessed through a public or university library, or through the media organization library that may have subscriptions to one or more vendors for all staff to use.
The growth of news websites has been a boon to the researcher. Even publications too small to have been attractive to the major news database vendors in the past now have their articles available in electronic backfiles. So if you want to be sure you’ve done a thorough job of identifying background information about a private-sector interviewee as part of your preparation for an interview, you would want to identify the news organization websites on which you want to search.
NewsLink – Find newspapers, magazines and radio / TV websites by region and by category.