June 15, 2000
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The work doesn't stop after that first article has come out: In fact, it's only just begun. As with any other field, business relationships are important, and in this case you can use relationships to influence coverage of topics you care about in the future.
From the other side, journalists may seem like one monolithic blob, but you should keep in mind that they're all different people. They have different talents and sympathies, they have different ideas as to what journalism should ideally look like. And to a certain extent, journalists are all in competition with each other.
You can use this competition to your advantage in at least one clear, easy way: You can become a regular contact, helping them advance and break stories before anybody else. Journalists get a lot of leads from press releases and from other journalists, sure, but they still depend on their own contacts — and if a journalist hears about a story six hours before anybody else, that makes their lives that much easier.
This is the tough part. You'll have to find journalists who you think stand out from the pack. You can use your own personal experience for this, and you can also ask other folks about their experiences with different journalists. After you've done that, you can try to figure out what kind of leads those journalists want. Don't be shy about writing them an e-mail out-and-out asking "What kind of stories are you looking for?"
And as a side note, you should remember that every journalist has a local newspaper or regional magazine that's looking for the local angle. If you're like me, you get a lot of your news from media with a national scope, whether that's online or through national magazines, but there are still a number of smaller regional and local news sources that are always dying for local-based content. And people do still read these.
Most of the issues we're dealing with, of course, are national or global in scope, but if you can dig up some local angle to a global story, you're that much closer to getting it run as a story in local news media. And you might be surprised at what kind of slight local angles are enough to get local coverage.
For example, let's say you know a reporter who lives in Iowa, and you also know, through IRC, an acquaintance who lives in Iowa who was named by the MPAA as somebody who was distributing DeCSS. From a national perspective, your acquaintance is hardly unique — there's no shortage of places to get DeCSS. But from a local perspective, it still might make a decent story. Not a lot happens in Iowa that can be linked to a national technology story. And maybe the reporter's dying to write about DeCSS, but hasn't been able to do it for any national publications. And, hell, maybe it's a slow week. If you went to the trouble of getting that acquaintance's permission to introduce em to the journalist, you just might get one more story.