June 15, 2000
This piece is adapted from a talk I gave at Rootfest on June 15, 2000, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
It makes extensive use of spivak gender pronouns, which I like better than consigning all my hypothetical people to one gender or the other.
I first got the idea to give a talk about this subject when I attended the first Rootfest last year -- I was actually writing about it for City Pages, which most of you probably know is the local alternative weekly newspaper. Without really having enough technical skills to claim the term for myself, I consider myself someone who's relatively in touch with the hacker community. Still, until that first Rootfest I hadn't realized the extent of anger and frustration that a lot of hackers had towards the media -- towards seeing that issues that they cared deeply about were being misrepresented and distorted with a kind of depressing regularity.
So my talk is meant to help address this problem, from the point of view of someone who's been a working journalist for a couple of years. I'll be talking very specifically about how the news-gathering process works, and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage to get your opinions represented as fairly as possible in the media. Since my personal experience is in magazines and newspapers, I'll be focusing on those areas, but most of what I say will apply to other media as well.
Stories about technology can turn out, depending on a lot of factors, anywhere from mildly inaccurate to wildly distorted. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which are specific to the world of technology, some of which come from working and thinking on the fringe of society.
This one's obvious: There are plenty of people who don't really understand or even like computers, and mass media has to account for them. They have to cater to the lowest common denominator in order to not alienate their audience -- television is the worst this way -- and as a result, complex technical issues are often oversimplified until they don't at all resemble the original picture.
Now, we can say that the new technological freedoms are letting people exchange all sorts of information, and most people think that's a good thing. Lots of people are getting online and realizing they can find information about video games or knitting or breast cancer. But they're also aware that you can find a lot of unsavory information online: white supremacist propaganda, or bomb-making instructions, or child pornography. And regardless of what you or I might think about whether or not that stuff should be available, a lot of people are pretty uncomfortable with its existence.
So any time you talk about a technological issue, and particularly when you come out on the side of decentralized control and greater individual freedom, there is always going to be an element of the public that wonders "Well, does he think child porn should be available freely, too?" It's a similar situation to political discussion of class issues during the height of the Cold War, where anybody who spoke with concern about the poor could be scrutinized as a possible Communist.
Any X-Files fan knows this one: The status quo does not have to prove its side to win a public debate. It simply has to muddy the waters to build enough "plausible deniability", and then people get confused. When they get confused, they stop paying attention and pull back from the debate -- and the status quo wins by default. I probably don't need to remind you guys that, for the most part, you are not the status quo.
In spite of the difficulties, I still think there's hope. Most of the distortion that occurs isn't due to a concerted conspiratorial effort; it's just that the devil's in the details. If you know how the system works, you can fix some of those details.
For the most part, most journalists do not genuinely start a story with a conscious motivation of favoring one side or another in some controversial issue. You'll probably just have to take my word for this, but most journalists actually do want to be fair to most of the people they interview. Unfortunately, journalists can be sloppy, or uninformed, or too rushed by a deadline or too constrained by a word count to get the story right. Also, some journalists are stupid. This isn't such an optimistic picture, but it does mean that since journalists aren't actually trying to distort these issues, there are ways to help them get a clearer understanding that they will appreciate.
There's really no such thing as objective news. It's a lie that journalists cling to because it makes our lives easier, and it's a lie that the public is mostly happy to swallow because it means they don't have to go to the trouble of being skeptical.
Bias can and will enter into a story in a hundred different ways, and one way is that if the journalist genuinely likes you as a person, nine times out of ten it'll reflect positively on your side of the story. If you come across as dismissive or elitist, it's not going to reflect well on what you say. But if you come across as open and helpful, it probably will.
A lot of media skills, then, consists of learning how to do some of the work for the journalist. It is extremely effective to present the relevant pieces of the story for the journalist to digest and spit out with minimal effort on eir part.
This is not fair. In an ideal world, maybe a world where the media wasn't driven by a profit motive, where the public had more time and courage in their choices of information, each journalist would have the luxury of really learning about each issue e writes about, and of presenting a complex story that matches a complex reality. This is not that ideal world. And you shouldn't have to do work for journalists.
But consider this: Any large public or private organization, from the Justice Department to the Motion Picture Association of America, hires people who do exactly this as a full-time job. They're called Public Relations, and much of what they do involves trying to be helpful to media in a way that will help the side they represent. If you go against them in a public forum, you will have to learn to play the game at that level.
If you get approached for an interview, the first thing you should do is think for a second about who e's doing the interview for. Each publication, web site, and television show can have its own distinct audience, and you should keep that into consideration as you do the interview.
One of the biggest ways for something to go wrong is for a story to become oversimplified and distorted, and obviously that's much more likely to happen when you're dealing with a non-technical audience. If you're dealing with someone who represents an audience like that, remember to overexplain a little, just to make sure.
As people with a very high level of technical interest, you're a member of subculture, and you can use that to your advantage. There are publications that aren't so tech-focused, but pretty non-mainstream, and they can be sympathetic to certain aspects of living outside the norm. The Village Voice is probably a good example: Its readers are no more technically savvy than the readers of Newsweek, but its readers are more likely to value certain aspects of individuality and being in a subculture, such as taking a stand based on an unpopular opinion.
On the other hand, a mainstream outlet is more likely to fall into the trap of portraying you as somebody who's just rebelling for the hell of it, to be cool, but not out of any genuine interest or belief. When you're dealing with those kinds of reporters, you may have to go out of your way to point out that it's not just a case of a corporation chasing down thrill-seeking kids, that there are actual issues and opinions at stake.
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.)
Traditionally, most good stories follow a basic back-and-forth rhythm: Anecdote, then reflection, then anecdote, then reflection. First you tell the audience something to set a scene in a recognizable place, with sympathetic characters, and describe what they're doing. Then you step back and talk about what that means.
You can find this in the Bible, or in a James Baldwin essay, or in a good history book. Too many anecdotes, and the piece can become a meaningless collection of slapped-together scenes. Too much reflection, and it becomes a philosophy paper. You need both, so you can make it both immediate and meaningful to the audience. 1
With the stories we're talking about, reflection is the easy part. You're dealing with issues of science and culture and law and politics, and technically savvy people enjoy taking the mind that they use to think about complex systems and applying that mind to the world at large. But what you can sometimes miss is that for your viewpoints to be communicated effectively, they have to be somehow emotionally relevant to the audience. Keeping in mind that most of your audience probably does not share your strong interest in technology, are there underlying emotions that you share with them, and that you can highlight to gain your audience's sympathy?
Remember that when you're sharing an opinion, chances are good that you're not the only person who thinks that way. The chances are much better that your own personal experiences and emotions can't quite be expressed by others in a similar way, which will make you stand out, to both the journalist, and to that journalist's audience. Don't be afraid of using it.
So if you wrote some code and were later sued for releasing it online, you should talk about how it's not fair, of course. But also talk about how excited you were, before the lawsuit, at the moment you got it to work. If your friend's house gets raided by the Justice Department, talk about the injustice, by all means. But make sure to let people know that this is your friend, and you're not just indignant -- you're upset, and you're concerned.
On the surface, an interview resembles an everyday conversation, if a slightly stilted one. But keep in mind that it's a mode of interaction with a lot of implicit expectations of what all the parties are going to get out of it. As the subject, you're trying to get your point-of-view clearly communicated in a public forum. As the interviewer, the reporter is trying to get whatever facts, opinions, and quotes e'll need to fill holes in eir story. It's okay to treat it like a transaction, and it can vary from a conversation in a few ways.
I don't know about anybody else, but when I was growing up, hanging out with my mostly geeky friends, we talked really fast. We took a lot of pride in being smart, and we loved spitting out words as fast as possible, trying to be the first to say something really insightful or funny.
You shouldn't think of interviews this way. In a day-to-day conversation, you try to avoid long pauses, because they're socially uncomfortable, and you can also run the risk of losing the attention of the person you're talking to. This isn't the case when you're dealing with the media. First, you can't lose their attention, because it's their job to listen to you for the duration of the interview. Second, any pause you make probably won't be noted in the resulting piece.
(Some might think that an unsympathetic TV reporter will use a pause to make you look like you've been cornered by a tough question, but my impression is that: 1. TV news stories are usually far too limited in length to allow for dramatic pauses, and 2. If a TV reporter wants to make you look bad, e works in a field with so little qualms about manipulating the story that your pause will be the least of your problems.)
So you should let yourself take healthy pauses. If you have to be silent for a couple of seconds so the sentence that comes out of your mouth is clearer and more succinct, it's worth it. The interviewer is paying attention to what happens when you open your mouth, not when you close it.
I can't tell you how many times I've done an interview and heard something that sounded, at the time, like the most profound thing I've ever heard in my life — then I transcribe the tape and realize that it's eight sentences end-to-end, and not a single sentence works without the other seven, and I end up summarizing the whole damn thing.
Remember that any quotes you get are going to be ripped out of context and slotted into a story, surrounded by expository text and other people's quotes. Try to make this process as easy as possible by providing clear sum-up sentences to longer things you may have said.
How is this different from a sound bite? Well, sound bites are a lot easier. The sum-up sentence takes a complex opinion and boils it down to its clearest form without sacrificing nuance. The sound bite takes a simple-minded opinion and makes it even simpler. Civic discourse would be in much better state if people used less sound bites: They're so common because most people in the political arena, besides being unscrupulous, aren't that smart.
Since the journalist will be asking all sorts of questions, and apparently leading the conversation, you may feel like being polite and going along. But if you feel like you have relevant opinions or anecdotes that you don't think will come up from the journalist's line of thinking, feel free to bring them up yourself. A professional journalist won't be upset if you do this, since nobody's perfect and there's a very good chance that your initiative will help that journalist write a better story. (An unprofessional journalist is not the kind of person you should be talking to at all.)
Say you're hanging out with a friend, and you couldn't remember the name of Veronica's bookish friend in Heathers. When you get home, you probably wouldn't go online first thing, look it up, and then call your friend, say "Her name was Betty Finn," and hang up.
But in interviews, that kind of behavior is normal and sensible. If you don't have something the reporter needs — and it could be as trivial as the exact date of your parents' wedding, or how many miles there are on your car — you should consider offering to look it up later, and letting em know.
Take the previously mentioned case of the webmaster who didn't know how many users his site had. Ideally, he would have had those numbers immediately on hand, but obviously they weren't that important to him. Failing that, the next best thing would've been to ask me what my deadline was, and, assuming he had a little time to write some script to process his logs, offer to e-mail me later with a number. Then, maybe two hours later, I'm working on my final copy, complete with a phrase that reads "XXXX people view his site in an average week", and I get an e-mail from him with an exact number. I plug it into the story and keep writing, simple as that.
Most of this talk so far has dealt with how to be interviewed, but now I'm going to switch gears a bit and deal with the possibility that you may want to take it a step further and become a regular press contact. That is, you make a point of seeking out journalists so you can be known as a source of opinions and information on topics of interest to you. There are a lot of concerns you could have about this: whether you feel you can fairly represent others, how to tread that fine line between advancement of your cause and advancement of yourself, and simply whether you have the temperment for the work. These are all legitimate concerns, but they're also very personal and subjective, so there's not much point in me addressing them — I'll just discuss how to go about it if you decide you want to.
If you do decide to make yourself a press contact, there's one overriding principle to keep in mind: A journalist's scarcest resource is time. Journalism tends to be extremely time-sensitive work, because there are so many deadlines, and because news happens whenever it feels like it. This holds true for local television, for weekly alternative newspapers, and monthly magazines: I once received an e-mail from an editor at a monthly magazine that said "Yes, let's do that story; by the way, can you have it in by tomorrow morning?"
Also, keep in mind that if you're dealing with somebody who's trying to make a living as a freelancer, e's eir own boss, which means e always has to watch the clock. Most freelancers don't make enough money where they can afford to be leisurely about their work, and after a couple of years as a freelancer, they learn to get as much story as possible out of as few hours as possible.
Not all sources are created equal. Journalists remember the sources that are good to them, and by "good to them", I mean they give the most usable story material in the shortest period of time. And if they like you as a source once, the chances are good they'll look you up the next time they have a similar story. Some of being a good source involves being a good interview subject, as we just discussed. Some of it comes from being a good contact, which you can do in a number of ways.
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. 2 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.
You don't have to be a corporation or a politician to issue a press release. Anybody can do it, and now that everybody has e-mail, it's even free. (Back in the day, you had to do it via fax, or even through snail-mail, paying postage and everything.) No good reporter relies solely on press releases for story leads, and anybody who receives press releases has to deal with a bad signal-to-noise ratio. But you'd be surprised how often stories do actually get started because a journalist scanned a press release and saw something e liked.
Obviously, if you find a way to crack RC5 with a PalmPilot, that's news, and you issue a press release. But you can issue a press release for a lot less. Political organization routinely issue press releases just because they have an opinion on something that's ongoing. The ACLU, the EFF, and pretty much every other advocacy organization routinely issue releases that say essentially "Such and such a thing is happening, and this is what we think about it."
This might feel silly, but remember that these press releases aren't so much to announce news as to point yourself out as a possible source. A journalist won't take one of those releases, rearrange the quotes, and turn it into a story. But a journalist could very easily see the release, decide it's worth a story, and put you at the top of eir list of sources to contact about it.
On paper, a press release shouldn't really be longer than a page; over e-mail you should consider limiting it to five or six paragraphs. Remember that you're trying to stand out from a constant stream of info, and that if you manage to pique the journalist's interest, e will pursue more information. So keep it short, and take a little time to make sure it's boiled down to its essentials.
A decent press release should include:
If you start compiling a mailing list, you should include the wire services, such as the Associated Press and Reuters. For those who don't know, wire services write stories that their newspaper subscribers pay for the privilege to reprint. The big papers, like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal, don't usually use the wires, but a lot of smaller papers do. You can see this in action by digging around on newspapers' web sites until you find the same story on papers in Anchorage, Oklahoma City, and Tallahassee. If you can get a quote or an opinion in a wire story, there's a chance that you'll get it in dozens of papers.
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.
Hopefully, what I've said here will be of some help. As somebody who works in journalism, I obviously have a little hope left for the field. It's unfortunate that things have evolved to such a state that people often need specialized knowledge to communicate effectively through the media; I hope this piece can help a little in correcting the resulting imbalance.
I would also like very much to hear feedback: Whether or not what I've said is obvious, helpful, debatable, or just plain wrong. I am especially interested in hearing about the experiences of people who have dealt with journalists.
1 For clarification of this principle I am indebted to Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a fantastic comic book by artist Jessica Abel and This American Life host Ira Glass which is all about how to do your own radio journalism. (More about Radio: An Illustrated Guide)
2 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.