Sheelagh McNeill
News Researcher, The New York Times
How researchers assemble facts at lightning speed
Sheelagh McNeill is a news researcher for the New York Times, where she helps journalists answer questions that are critical to their reporting.
McNeill has worked through historic moments like the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For McNeill, these and other events reinforce the importance of news researchers tasked with collecting and assembling facts at lightning speed.
But the digital revolution has changed her job in profound ways. Not only are research desks more sparsely employed these days, they’re also competing against accelerated information cycles. Despite that, McNeill says the human elements of discernment and news judgment will remain critical to the industry.
By Robert Davis
The first big mass shooting that I covered was Columbine in 1999. I remember how intense it was, the brutality of it and the high number of victims. The researchers were asked for contacts for all the victims’ families and whatever personal information we could find.
They also asked for information about shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, their families, everything we could find out about them. I learned to compartmentalize and just focus on the work. I could get very emotional because it was so awful. I hoped that by building a profile of the victims, their friends and families could tell us about who they were, tell their stories.
News research was always very fast-moving, but now it seems relentless.
We used to have a deadline of 6:30 p.m. in the newsroom. That was the print deadline. We still have a print deadline, but with the ability to publish to the web instantaneously, the deadlines are constant. When we are covering breaking news such as mass shootings, we go live. This means the deadline is “as soon as you can get it,” so the pace of the work is different and more intense.
Despite those challenges, I think research remains essential. That’s why it is terrible when I see other news researchers lose their jobs. It happened to me at ABC News back in 2009 after 12 years of employment, and then again in 2014 when I first worked for the New York Times.
We provide an invaluable service to the newsroom. We are experts in searching and have the experience and education to find almost anything. News librarians need critical-thinking skills and good judgment to excel.
New Tools for Old Problems
When I started out as a researcher at ABC News in 1996, it was the early days of the internet. We still used a modem to log into databases and had an in-house library full of books.
I got lucky and ABC News had just subscribed to AutoTrack, a public-records database. I became an expert and was able to train my colleagues on it. The software allowed us to look up information like addresses, phone numbers, and property records for millions of people.
Knowing those skills was essential on 9/11. I was working overnight at the New York Times at that point, when we got the first names of the hijackers. I will always remember looking up “Mohamed Atta” in AutoTrack at three in the morning. Almost immediately, the New York Times had sent reporters to the cities where the hijackers had flown from. Additionally, they had sources in law enforcement and government that they could call.
My job has changed in terms of what is now available to me online. The advent of the internet and the digital revolution has impacted the media in profound ways. Having access to vast databases means that research is much quicker and there are more places to look. I used to make a lot more phone calls. Now I mostly search online to find things out.
We provide an invaluable service to the newsroom. We are experts in searching and have the experience and education to find almost anything.
As researchers in the digital age, we are always looking for new ways to do our work. We pay attention to how people communicate, as it is always changing. For instance, we use social media whenever we are looking to build a dossier on someone because it can provide a wealth of personal information.
A good example of this was the January 6 insurrection. They were using Telegram, Parler, Gab, and Reddit to plan. We needed to sign up for all of these and figure out how to search them.
The internet and advances in computer technology may have sped up our work, but the world is still full of seemingly intractable problems that only humans can solve. Often when I am working on something, I think, “This doesn’t smell right, or this person is not telling the truth.” I am tenacious, and I dig to get to the bottom of it. I don’t think a machine can do that.