Voices: Digital tools make it easy to go back in time for a book

LOS ANGELES - We all know how journalism has changed in the digital age--we don’t wait for the morning or afternoon paper anymore to get the latest news. It's available in the moment, around the clock.

But what about the logistics of writing a book about historical subjects? How do you use digital tools to go back in time without stepping on a plane?

I posed this question recently to Jeffrey Toobin, the senior CNN legal analyst and staff writer for The New Yorker, who is out on the book tour circuit plugging his American Heiress tome. It's about the abduction of heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974 and its aftermath.

I know something about what it’s like to go back in time for book research. My first two books were about TV game shows and how Las Vegas became a gambling and entertainment mecca, both primarily set in the 1950s and 1960s. I wrote them in the late 1980s.

I remember many trips to university libraries far from home, reading through tedious reams of microfiche for old newspaper and magazine clippings. For the Come on Down book, for instance, I spent hours at the library combing through the first issues of TV Guide.

But Toobin didn’t have to leave home to do all of his research. “Much of what I wanted was online,” he says.

The Berkeley Barb, an underground paper outside San Francisco, was online and available via the archives of New York University, near Toobin’s home, he said.

And for the rest--the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner? “Newspapers.com,” he says.

“It wasn’t perfect,” he says. But it did the trick.

Newspapers.com is a website with an archive of 4,100 papers the company says date back to the 1700s. Monthly subscription rates start at $7.95. Beyond authors, the site is also targeted to history and genealogy buffs.

The size of the archive and accessibility to papers is amazing. As a lark, I found my parents' wedding announcement in the The Indianapolis Star from 1954 and my grandmother’s 1980 obit.

Newspapers played a huge role in Toobin;’s research, because it was a newspaper clipping that gave birth to the abduction of Hearst. One of the kidnappers saw her engagement announcement in the San Francisco Examiner, went to UC Berkeley to find her home address (schools made that kind of information public back then) and soon Hearst got a late-night knock on the door that evolved into 19 months with the Symbionese Liberation Army, culminating with her bank robbery conviction.

Another huge resource for Toobin--one I certainly didn’t have for Come on Down or Vegas: Live and In Person--was social media.

More specifically, Facebook.

The social network is “an incredible tool for a journalist,” he says.

Toobin didn’t use Facebook to locate members of the ‎Symbionese Liberation Army, which abducted Hearst; most of them are dead. But he did find lawyers who had represented them back then, as well as former FBI agents who had worked on the case. “It was enormously helpful,” he says.

(Obviously Toobin didn't do all his research from his New York apartment. He went to San Francisco and Los Angeles and interviewed many people in person.)

Toobin also used digital tools to archive the 150 boxes of research material he purchased from former SLA leader Bill Harris. Instead of having to rummage through all the boxes at once, he paid a friend to archive the folders digitally in a Word document. He had looked into scanning them all, but says there were so many boxes, it would have been too expensive.

“This was my improved way of dealing with massive paper.”

Now, and I've been waiting for this for years--can someone find me a digital tool to accurately transcribe long interviews and get them 100% right? That's the missing link, and what we all need.

Graham is a USA TODAY tech reporter, based in Los Angeles. His father, Jerry Graham, worked side by side with Toobin’s mom, Marlene Sanders, at WNEW Radio in the early 1960s.