(See related pages)
|
|
|
How good is mail service in your area? And how does it compare to the U.S. Postal Service's performance in other areas? Here's a way to find out. For this first exercise in using the computer to gather information for a news story, I am asking Jeff South, associate professor, School of Mass Communications, Virginia Commonwealth University, to serve as a guide. When you do this exercise, the data below may be outdated. If so, use the new figures, following the same procedure. Write a 300-word story for the local newspaper. Strategy: We're most likely to find this information on the U.S. Postal Service's Web site. Typically, Web site addresses follow this convention: http://www.<name or acronym of company or agency>.<top-level domain> According to that pattern, the address for the U.S. Postal Service's Web site would be: (The 'gov' domain is for federal governmental entities; the Postal Service falls in this category. When you go to www.usps.gov, you're automatically redirected to www.usps.com. That's because the Postal Service considers itself more of a business than a government agency, and it prefers the 'com' domain.) This URL gets us to the Postal Service's main home page:
Now, think of the information you want – and the keywords associated with it: You want to know about the Postal Service's performance, and perhaps what percentage of mail arrives on time. There may be a couple of ways to find such statistics. You could click on the button that says "About USPS & News," and browse the latest press releases for a relevant headline. But first, let's search the site for documents containing the words "on-time performance":
When you run that search, you get the following "hits":
From the results summary, these appear to be the same press release: One is a Web page (pr06_033.htm), and the other is an Adobe Acrobat document (pr06_033.pdf). Click on the link to the Web-page version of the press release:
Here, we have the text of the press release – and at the bottom, a table containing the on-time performance score for states and metropolitan areas:
The table shows, for example, that 97 percent of the mail in "Big Sky" country (Montana) arrives on time – but only 93 percent in Chicago arrives on time. You could take this a step farther by pasting the table into Excel and sorting it by the percentage column. That way, instead of eye-balling the highs and lows, you can have the computer give you the definitive answer:
|
