In the pre-Internet days, one of the standby reference books on the desks of most Canadian journalists was a book called Sources. In it, you got a listing, indexed by subject, of, well, sources. It was a great reference if you needed to find someone who could speak intelligently about rail safety or arctic wildlife or tax law. Sources is still published but I suspect most newsrooms and most journalists might use the electronic version.
Then in the early Internet days, there was a neat service called ProfNet. A journalist would e-mail a query to ProfNet and then the query would get circulated to the PR shops at universities and colleges across the continent (but mostly in the U.S.). If you were lucky, someone would call you back and, presto, you just found a new source. Somewhere along the way, ProfNet was incorporated into/bought by PR Newswire. I haven't used it in a while but it's still there.
Now there's a new service, Bob LeDrew let me know the other day, that does something similar to ProfNet. It's called JournalistSource and it's looking for journalists who want to use it and sources who might be valuable, erm, sources (!) for journalists. I encourage you to check it out.
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