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.
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![]() The above search statement is what Gene came up with to achieve about 70% relevancy in searching for "trend stories" on Nexis |
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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.