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Trendspotting
A presentation at the 2002 SLA News Division conference

Speakers: Gene Balk and Ellen Ratchye

Reported by Michael Jesse

    The News Division co-hosted this session with the Advertising and Marketing Division, with each division providing a speaker on how to research "trend" topics.


The above search statement is what Gene came up with to achieve about 70% relevancy in searching for "trend stories" on Nexis

Program slides:

If you have Powerpoint, you can view Gene Balk's presentation. If you do not have Powerpoint, try the HTML version.

    The News Division speaker was Gene Balk of the Orange County Register. News researchers are used to reporters asking "is this a trend?" and "can you find me trend stories on this?" But finding a "trend story" in multiple online archives is not so easy.

     Part of Gene's presentation was focused on searching for trend stories on Lexis-Nexis. Nexis does use "trends" as an indexing term, but it is applied so broadly (on calendar items for example) that use of this term alone is insufficient.

     In preparation for his presentation, Gene experimented with various other indexing terms used in Nexis and constructed a complex search statement in which the "trends" term is combined with an assortment of other Nexis terms such as "youth culture," "mature markets," "boomer," "luxury goods," etc which he found were often applied to stories describing consumer purchasing trends. He also found it necessary to "not out" a list of other indexing terms which tended to produce general business stories off the mark from social-consumer trends.

     Although there is not much free market research on the open Web, Gene showed several sites where limited market research is available. These included: marketresearch.com, statistics.com, www.faithpopcorn.com, trendcentral.com, iconoculture.com, bolt.com, and icelounge.com. Each of these have strengths and weaknesses as news research sources, however, and the researcher has to make critical judgments about the information and sourcing found on these sites.

    The Ad-Marketing speaker was Ellen Ratchye of Fallon Worldwide. Although marketing researchers and news researchers often pursue similar questions and use similar sources, their jobs are quite different. Ellen described a typical workflow at Fallon in which a particular client is looking for insight into "the customer of the future." Ellen explained how a combination of marketing research and general research tools are used.

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