Emmarie Huetteman/MNS
The scourge of Washington reporters: the silent telephone.
WASHINGTON — It doesn’t take much to make me happy — a large sweet tea from Chick-fil-A. “Harry Potter” weekends on ABC Family. A ringing phone.
Covering education in Washington in July means I get to talk to a lot of voicemail boxes and apologetic assistants. Even communications directors return my calls with their children, high on summer freedom, chattering happily in the background.
But at least they call me back.
Andy Kroll, a reporter at Mother Jones, said he persuades sources to respond by making every story sound as urgent as possible.
“With the way the news cycle works here and as fast as it is, if you don’t tell someone it’s absolutely urgent and breaking, they could call you back in three days, and then your idea is last year’s news,” Kroll said.
Try these other techniques to get your phone ringing and your stories well-sourced:
• Begging: The National Education Association recommends that reporters facing deadline use the subject line “Help, I’m on deadline!” on e-mail requests. Leaving a voicemail and an e-mail with a generic subject one day got me nowhere. Using the “Help, I’m on deadline!” technique the next day got me a call within an hour.
• Harassing: Kroll said keeping a source’s phone ringing will make yours ring, too. “If you don’t follow up, [sources] almost don’t take you seriously. They expect that second call or third call or fourth call.”
• Lying: Telling a source your actual deadline is a rookie mistake. You risk getting that return call 10 minutes before deadline or falling prey to the calculating source who passive-aggressively waits until your story is published to call. Outsmart both by saying your 6 p.m. deadline is actually 4 p.m.
• Stalking: It’s harder to ignore a reporter who is standing in your office blocking the coffee machine than it is to ignore a reporter who is on hold on line two. To best a campaign manager who was giving me the run-around, I once drove six hours to a candidate’s hometown. Not only did I get my interview, I got to visit the candidate’s home and meet her family.
• Two-Timing: Don’t let your story depend on one source, if you can help it. If you need a comment from a policy expert, call agencies, think-tanks and universities until you get a (good) source to call you back.
And when all else fails, be creative.
“The bar for being crazy in Washington is really high,” Kroll said.
A Medill graduate student in public affairs reporting, Emmarie Huetteman previously worked at NPR affiliate Michigan Radio and the University of Michigan’s newspaper, The Michigan Daily. She wrote this opinion piece for Washington Reporting 2.0, an occasional column about the experience of reporting.