June 15, 2000
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You'll most likely have to explain some technical issue, and this process can range from annoying to painful. There are a few things you can do to limit the aggravation.
Remember that even if the journalist seems to have a solid technical understanding of the issues involved, e might want to hear you explain it in your own words. Maybe e wants to make sure e's got it down right, or maybe e's thinking it might make a good quote. Make a point of asking your interviewer if e wants you to explain it -- though, of course, you should do it with the intent of helping, not showing how much smarter you are than em.
I recently interviewed somebody about his website, and I asked him to give me a ballpark figure of how popular it was. He didn't have the logs processed in terms of an estimate of unique visitors, but he offered that his disk quota was a certain number of Megs, and that he ended up having to erase his logs every couple of weeks or so. What he had in mind was that such a number would be better than nothing, but in fact it wasn't.
It is possible to roughly estimate site traffic based on the growth in kilobytes of server logs. And I'm technically skilled enough that I could do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, and say "based on the average growth of his log files, I estimate that his site gets X number of hits a week."
But the whole point of my reportage is to get those kinds of facts from the primary source. Depending on who I'm writing for, I'll be able to interject my own opinions to varying degrees, but the more concrete facts -- statistics, events, etc. -- should be coming from somebody else. And besides, maybe I only have 500 words to write this story, and I'm not about to spend 150 words explaining where I got one statistic.
So, when you're asked for that stuff, be as definitive as possible, and in terms that the reader will understand instantly. If the journalist has to massage your data or your assertion to make it clear to the reader, there's a chance e may have to drop it entirely.
(Granted, gathering stats on unique visitors is a dicey proposition at best, what with people using dynamic IPs on dialup and others using a single IP as part of a LAN and such. But it's only as unreliable as every other statistic you could ever be asked to provide, so the example holds, if in a somewhat cynical kind of way.)
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