June 15, 2000
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The easiest step you can take is to set up a web site that discusses a topic you care about. Journalists use these sites just as much as everybody else.
Usability and information architecture is important, and there's no shortage of good advice available on how to make your site easy to use and to navigate. 1 What's good for general users will help journalists, too, but if you want to take that extra step you should account for the fact that journalists represent a very specific subset of your users. You can add pages to your site that are tailored specifically for their needs.
Peacefire.org, for those of you who might not know, is an organization devoted to fighting the spread of censorware, both in public institutions and private homes. Their site has a page devoted to Press Information, and it is the best press information page I have ever seen online from any institution, public or private. There are a couple of reasons why.
Under the heading Resources for journalists writing serious articles, the user is given two different options: My deadline is a few days away, or My deadline is an hour ago. The only real difference is that the reporter with a few days is given links so they can do more in-depth reading. However, the organization of the site based on the particular needs of the user — a journalist constantly counting how many hours are left until deadline — is going to help that user get to what e wants more quickly.
Of course, the page gives ways to contact people who support Peacefire's opinions, but it also provides people who oppose it. Looking at a page like this tells me that as a reporter I don't have to really go anywhere else to find interview subjects: I can just go down this list.
And not only does the page refer to people with differing opinions, it gathers them into multiple categories. There are five, really:
This is practically a checklist for a journalist in a hurry: Get a decent interview with one of each, and you'd be set. You'd have two outside experts with opposing opinions, someone who has the personal angle of having their own site blocked, a software company representative defending the quality of their company's product, and a politician talking about what the government's going to do about it. By organizing their sources like this, Peacefire helps hurried journalists — say, someone who only has time to interview five people, or maybe even just three — focus their thinking and make decisions as to who to call.
There are a lot of important little facts that a journalist is obliged to collect, but would rather not spend too much time on. Things like job title, organization, and relevant history with the subject. This page conveniently lists all those facts, so that when I write my story (after quickly double-checking with the interviewee) I can attribute the first quote from a source with a phrase like "says Jim Tyre, who is a founding member of the Censorware Project."
The Press Information page also contains a link to another page, called The 2 most common mistakes when writing about blocking software. Journalists love this stuff, because they work in a very competitive field, and they know that while they're writing a story, twenty other journalists are digging for the story, too. Ever notice how news spreads so quickly these days, how once you hear a big story on, say MSNBC, next thing you know it's in CNN, Wired, Industry Standard, and News.com? Media sources follow one other's leads all the time, and when you're a reporter, you know that a large part of job is to dig up the angles that no other reporter will find. Seeing a link that says "The 2 most common mistakes when writing about ..." is like stumbling across a bottle of IQ pills.
1 If this is actually the first time you've thought about this, the first place to look for more info is Jakob Nielsen's archives of his Alertbox columns.
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