Serious researchers figured out some years ago that regional business publications provided a unique perspective on companies, industries, and business climate. Business people felt more comfortable speaking with a local reporter and frequently gave away company secrets, leaked corporate strategies, and provided sensitive industry data. They assumed that the only people who would read their comments were the few locals who subscribed to the paper-not their competitors, not their business partners.

Until about 15 years ago, they were correct. That was when Business Dateline joined the arsenal of online databases accessed by professional researchers, but before competitive intelligence became a common business concept. Not that Business Dateline by itself affected the online research world-other major business databases added significant U.S. regional business content, notably Trade & Industry and PROMT. Primarily, the source material added to these databases was the weekly business journals that, at the time, were recent startups.

NO DUCKING THE ISSUE

When I originally wrote about the growing importance of localized business information ("Finding Regional U.S. Business Information," ONLINE, Vol. 11, No. 3 (May 1987): pp. 107-110), I made a big point about the importance of regional information. Two major developments changed that situation. First, most companies now train field personnel in the perils of the regional press. The regional press, as I wrote about it and as competitive intelligence professionals warn their clients about it, is the weekly business journals, monthly business magazines, and the business section of the metropolitan daily papers. The caution that companies drill into employees outside headquarters translates into fewer indiscretions in the regional press. Still, the perspective from the local angle is bound to be different from that of the national press.

The second development, perhaps of more interest to information professionals, is the increasing online abundance of not just regional, but very local, publications. This is partially due to major hosts, such as Dialog, EBSCO, and LEXIS-NEXIS, initiating a major push to put more newspapers online and partially due to the interest of small, local papers in having an Internet presence. When you get more local than regional, the situation of 15 years ago repeats itself. Business people once again have the opportunity to speak frankly-and quite possibly unwisely-to a local reporter. A local paper with a miniscule subscription base, published only once or twice a week, is not seen as threatening.

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Business Dateline, produced by ProQuest and available on DataStar, Dialog, Factiva, NEXIS, OCLC, and ProQuest, is the only surviving stand-- alone database from the era that created the interest in regional business information. Other regional business publications have been subsumed into general business databases such as PROMT, Trade & Industry, Business & Industry, and World Reporter. World Reporter contains not only business news from outside the U.S., but also the Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News from regional U.S. newspapers.

Hosts such as Factiva and NEXIS have integrated regional business publications from many sources, including direct contracts with publishers, into their general news files. On EBSCOHost, selected full text of major regional newspapers is aggregated in Newspaper Sources. The regional business journals are part of Business Source Elite. Business Dateline, however, remains the lodestar for regional business publications.

With 450 U.S. and Canadian titles dating back to the mid-1980s, Business Dateline cannot be surpassed for quantity or depth of archival data. Although it is not comprehensive-excluding classifieds, short notices, and the like-it does include almost all feature articles from the publications it covers.

If you are doing a free-text search, Business Dateline will zero in on regional information for you with no trouble at all. There have been some anomalies introduced over time in some of the fields, however. With a name like Business Dateline, you might expect this database to give special treatment to the actual dateline of the articles. You would not be disappointed. This has, from day one, been a strong point of this database. Suppose you want information about a huge multinational company but you don't want every mention of the company. You really want to know what it's up to in Dayton, Ohio. The good news is that you can search Business Dateline for the company name ANDed with Dayton in the dateline field. The bad news is that standardization of entries in that field has eroded. You will find the following variants: dayton ohio; dayton oh us north central; dayton, oh, us; dayton, oh, us, north central; and dayton, ohnorth central, us. These are not cross-posted, so truncation is recommended. If you just want the state, there's one posting for dateline as ohio and another for the acronym oh. These are cross-posted, so use either one.

GEOGRAPHIC CHALLENGES

Effective use of the dateline field may well entail an intense knowledge of the geography of the area. You might think that a company head-- quartered in, say, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, according to its promotional material, would have articles in the regional press datelined as Pittsburgh. But if you're local, the dateline might read West Mifflin, or Ambridge, or Mount Lebanon. A Kansas City company, such as Intertec Publishing, actually has its headquarters in Overland Park and will be thus date-- lined. And there is always the issue of Kansas City, Kansas versus Kansas City, Missouri. Not all datelines are extremely local; I found several for Europe. Now there's a broad geographic area for a dateline.

There are also some titles in Business Dateline to challenge the detective in you. I had it on good authority that the Des Moines Business Record was part of Business Dateline. It is, but it's listed as either Business Record, with no geographic reference provided, or Business Record (Des Moines). Again, no cross-- postings, so use both. It's times like this that I appreciate the EXPAND command in Dialog.

AMERICAN BUSINESS JOURNALS

A major driver of regional business information is American City Business Journals. Run now by Ray Shaw (ex-Dow Jones executive), this holding company for 41 regional business journals is a powerhouse. No stranger to online information, the ACBJ titles are included in Business Dateline, but are also online at the publisher's site (http://www.bizjournals.com). The backfile ranges from 1996 for the majority of titles to a few others added in 1997, 1998, and one in 1999. Bizjournals updates every Monday and beats Business Dateline every time, since ACBJ embargoes the titles it sends to ProQuest. The lag on Business Dateline is three to four weeks. If you think something ran within the past month in an ACBJ publication, search Bizjournals before trying Business Dateline. If it's archival, I'd still try Bizjournals first since searching is free. If I don't find what I want, the second step is a traditional host. If the article was published before 1996, however, go directly to a traditional source.

Search capabilities include + to include, - to exclude, and double quotation marks for phrase searching. You can date-range from an extensive pull-down menu. Results are in reverse chronological order, giving title, date, and newspaper name. There is no indication as to length, which is a shame, because many are quite short--only two or three lines.

Bizjournals has done some interesting repackaging of articles from its newspaper collection. Under Industry Journals in the left-hand frame, you can select an industry (such as Banking & Finance, High Tech, or Tourism & Hospitality) and retrieve the latest articles pertinent to that industry from all the newspapers.

You can also limit to a particular city. Industry Journals requires registration, but it's free. Also in the left-hand frame is Extra Edge that provides tailored information for small businesses. It's a combination of articles and columns from the newspapers with additional helpful advice and, in at least one case, business forms.

Note that the URL for the aggregated American City Business Journals is plural. If you enter the singular (http://www.bizjournal.com), you arrive in the Roanoke Valley at the Blue Ridge Business Journal, which is a paper not owned by ACBJ.

LOCAL YOKELS

Want something really local? Try Newschoice (http://www.newschoice. com). It aggregates 50 U.S. local papers from The Argus in Fremont, CA, to The Devens Commerce Journal in Devens, MA, to The Fort Morgan Times in Fort Morgan, CO. There is no overlap with the papers presented in Business Dateline. The archive extends to November 1999.

You can search across all 50 papers or you can pick just one. Searching is fairly rudimentary. Enter terms, select a particular paper, or search across all of them, and choose a date range. If you select the paper from Newschoice's pulldown menu, be aware that newspaper titles beginning with The, such as The North Adams Transcript and The Park Record, are listed under T. Results can be displayed by relevance or by date. I find date more reliable than whatever algorithm is used to determine relevance.

Newschoice is probably not up to the normal information professional's standard. It has an amateur look and feel to it; there are numerous duplicate records; and sources are not clearly identified in the initial results. In fact, even when the full text displays, you may not be able to tell which newspaper published the article. There are no instructions for use at the Newschoice site. By trial and error, I determined that you can search phrases by enclosing them in double quotes. You cannot search on single letters, so finding information on the company Flying J, for example, is not possible. In spite of its deficiencies, Newschoice (it's parent company is Media News Group, owner of The Denver Post) is valuable for its coverage of newspapers too small to be included in any other source.

HITTING THE LOCAL SOURCES

Aggregated sources are a boon for comprehensive, all-about-company-- X-or-topic-Y searches. For geographically-based searches, "everything going on in city A or county B," the ability to search datelines is a tremendous shortcut. The other approach is searching the local newspapers individually, hoping they will cover local businesses. When you are looking at small towns, you can't expect a weekly business journal to exist. Searching individual sites is always a problematic exercise, since they vary tremendously in searchability, currency, archive depth, and update frequency.

Several Web guides exist that list and link to local sources. The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) lists both members and non-members (http://www.newspaperlinks.com) by state. Start4a11 (http://www.start4a11. com) claims "more newspapers" and also provides state-by-state lists. Yahoo?'s list of regional business papers is disappointing, as it is not very lengthy. Newstation (http:/www. newstation.com) lists newspapers by four broad U.S. regions. Minneapolisbased Dolan Media Company, which operated daily and weekly business and legal publications in 17 cities, does not aggregate its papers. Instead, on its ClickData site (http:/www. clickdata.com), it lists and links to not only the papers it owns, but some other specialized business sources with which it has partnership agreements, including infoAmerica. Since there is no overlap with American City Business Journals, it would be nice if Dolan would provide searchable access across its publications.

It is advisable to look at all these sites when identifying local sources, since there is some overlap, but unique titles appear on all of them. For example, the NAA site has 16 Utah titles, while Start4a11 has 20. Only eight titles overlap. Editor & Publisher's Media Lists (http://www. mediainfo.com/emedia) has 21 titles11 Start4a11 titles are included and seven NAA. Yahoo!'s list of general newspaper titles also numbers 21, but has three variations on news from Brigham Young University's student newspaper. There are no Utah titles in Yahoo!'s regional business category, Newstation, or ClickData lists. Similar fragmented patterns exist for other parts of the country.

Regardless of the fragmentation of local business sources, their increasing online availability makes it even harder to hide critical information from tenacious business researchers.