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IRE's Beat Source Guide


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Try starting with a simple search on one beat. These are your choices: Agriculture / Arts / Business / Courts / Crime / Demographics / Disasters / Education / Entertainment / Environment / Federal Government / First Amendment / FOIA / Health Care / Homeland Security / Housing / International / Justice / Law / Law Enforcement / Local Government / Military / News Sources / Nonprofit Organizations / Politics / Religion / Science / Sports / State Government / Terrorism / Transportation

Be specific. Use words you think are only in the documents you want. Searching for EARTHQUAKE gives you fewer results than DISASTERS and they'll be closer to what you want.

Use quotes to search for an exact phrase. For example, "NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE" finds that exact phrase. Also, putting single spaces between words, returns the text in that exact order.

Use different words with the same meaning. Say you're looking for documents about Hispanic population. Try this: HISPANIC OR LATINOS. The OR operator finds documents containing any of these words.

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