Internet training on a rainy Saturday

Today, I conducted a computer-assisted reporting workshop for nine Kharkiv journalists. We held it at the Boiko School, which graciously allowed us to use their computer lab. What a terrific setup: Everybody had a computer with high-speed Internet access and all the software we needed (Internet Explorer and Excel).

The workshop focused on two things:

How to find information for news stories on the Internet. I showed my favorite Google "hacks": how to search a specific domain or Web site for documents containing a specific word or phrase (like searching the Ukrainian president's Web site for references to Chernobyl); how to see who "owns" a Web site (for example, who is behind Web sites that try to arrange Ukrainian marriages for American men); and how to search blogs for story ideas and people to quote in your stories.

How to use spreadsheets to analyze information for stories. We used Excel to sort data, filter data and do calculations. For example, we took World Health Organization data and found that in Ukraine, women live on average 8 years longer than men. That is way more than most other countries. We also took Ukrainian population data and calculated the ratio between divorces and marriages: One oblast had almost twice as many divorces as marriages; another had three times as many marriages as divorces. All these were good beginning points for stories, we agreed.

On the whole, I've found that Ukrainian journalists are technologically sophisticated. But I detected some "ah-ha!" moments in the room; so I think I managed to introduce some new skills.

The timing for this session was good: Google has been improving its Russian-language interface (finally, you can search for Russian-language news; unfortunately, Google's Ukrainian interface doesn't have that feature yet).

Google also has way to put a button on your Web browser that will instantly translate any Web page into another language. Moreover, whenever you click on a link on that page, the ensuing page also will be translated. Very cool.

I put my handouts and data for the session online; I'll soon post the Russian-language handouts, too. As we left the Boiko School, we noticed that somebody had decorated the gate with gloves: