This one puzzles me. If you want to reach a college teacher, just google and the email pops right up. Even famous people such as Paul Krugman have their emails right up there on the webpage.
But journalists . . . not so much. I get it that Walter Cronkite or whoever doesn’t want randos emailing him at all hours of the night, but even more obscure journalists don’t seem to like to make it so easy to contact them.
Why is that? I’d think that if you’re a reporter you’d want people to be able to reach you as directly as possible, no?
There are some exceptions such as Stephanie Lee who gives her direct contact right here, but she’s an unusual sort of journalist who’s interesting in afflicting the comfortable (and sometimes the public relations apparatus of comfortable fight back). What about all the other journalists out there? Why do they keep their emails secret?
I’m not saying this is a conspiracy; I’m sure there’s a simple answer. I just don’t know it.
Most of them have prominently displayed social media information… maybe they expect you to message them on twitter before swapping e-mails?
Anon:
I guess, but twitter is kinda public, and not everyone has a twitter account. They don’t just want to hear from other journalists, they also want to hear from civilians with tips, no?
They do tend to say things like “If you want to contact me, my DMs are open” a lot. So ithink yes, they want to hear from civilians with tips…on Twitter.
Here is a rephrasing of the question that may also provide an answer:
Are reporters part of the service industry? or the entertainment industry?
I see college professors as serving, certainly serving their students, but also the community (both local and scientific or other larger communities), so they are happy to be contacted by those they serve.
We do not really expect movie, tv, sports, and music stars to be publicly accessible (stalking and other issues) and they make a big deal about privacy when not in the public eye.
I think that reporters should be part of the service industry, but they may see themselves as more entertainment (and some of the sloppy reporting pointed out in this blog and elsewhere suggests at least some reporters are more interested in being famous than in providing useful service/information).
I thought this was a really good question, and I don’t have the answer either. So in my curiosity I asked ChatGPT what it predicts to be the answer (I literally see people rolling their eyes at reading this). It suggested four reasons: managing of workload, gatekeeping/ filtering of incoming information (i.e. ‘spam/ nutjob protection’), privacy and safety, and professional boundaries. I don’t think any of these reasons (except for the privacy one, particularly if you research something like the Mafia) really make it mandatory to withhold contact information since academic professionals face the very same issues. I guess the answer might lie in what Greg Snow writes, the different ‘origin’ of the journalism compared to academic research: In academia, it’s the default to publish where your office is and how to contact you, sometimes even office hours if you offer them. Journalists however traditionally hail from the print media industry (at least that’s their roots) with its corporate structure.
Also, they usually go to the people instead of asking them to visit their office hour. Hunting for stories instead of people haunting your office. So I guess it’s largely due to different cultural defaults that journalists do not publish their contact information, unlike academic researchers.
I have actually had good luck reaching journalists via email. I did that recently with a ProPublica reporter and I’ve had success with local newspaper reporters as well. Perhaps Andrew has been targeted as a methodological terrorist.
Dale:
I’ve been able to reach journalists via email . . . when I can find their emails. But usually their emails are not so easy to find!
Short answer: Reporters don’t care what the public thinks and don’t need to get tips from the public. They have their sources in the deep state and all they need to do to win a Pulitzer is serve as scribes for the narratives the deep state wants to propagate such as that Donald Trump actively colluded with “Russians” in 2016. And you don’t need to correct your stories when they are proven false either. As the Twitter files prove, the media colludes with this same deep state to control the information flow in the US. There is now a lot of very good reporting on what is happening here from Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald and Michael Schellenberger and others. Josh Seigel has a very long piece in Tablet on how the war on terror has been broadened to domestic US “targets.” Even The Columbia Journalism Review has a series of long pieces on the Russian collusion narrative by Jeff Gerth.
Dpy:
No, that Columbia Journalism Review article had major problems. In any case, this blog is not the place to get into this sort of political argument about the “deep state” etc. Please save that for twitter and 4chan!
You are pointing to a flaw in reporting on public opinion surveys. But that’s a small part of the story and not really relevant to the main point. Gerth is not the only one either. But you are right he should have gotten some statistical expert to look at this.
Gerth was spot on. Corporate media is compromised. Just careerists with j school debt pushing establishment pieties. Propagandists…
These days? Fear of death threats.
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who has been frustrated by trying to find journalists’ email addresses. This comes up not infrequently when I teach about Energy and the Environment, looking for info behind articles or attempting to make comments or suggestions. It’s very puzzling. I can certainly understand not making one’s primary / personal email address available, but not having any way to be contacted is strange. How do these people find new ideas? (University press releases and content-free Twitter posts, perhaps.)
I came across this the other day (sorry for the twitter link Andrew, but I think its worth it). Apparently now a journalist can ask chatGPT for quotes from whatever “expert” and it will make some up for you with fake sources:
https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1654507639265533953
Its actually more common everywhere. I’m almost positive it is because of email scraping. Mass emailing is a common tool of phishers and email spoofers, and I imagine this is a concern of highly targeted businesses. Its why most businesses limit emailing to form responses on their sites with a “contact us” section. Extra degree of separation makes it more costly to scrape and email programmatically.
You’ll notice some websites take other mitigations by making you click or do captcha to see the email. Cloudflare even implements a separate email protection as a service (see https://www.matthewthom.as/blog/stop-email-scraping/)
I’m not sure this explains it. When I worked for Boeing, I used company email for all professional activity. Boeing had very effective spam detection filters. In fact, I can’t recall a single instance where it filtered out an email I wanted to see. I’d be surprised if big corporate media companies don’t have these as well.
In any case, there are pretty sophisticated filters even at places like AOL. I get hundreds of emails every day on my personal email. Every month of so an email I want to see goes to spam. All you have to do is move it to your inbox and click the “not spam” button and you will get future emails from this sender.
I still think that the answer is that they don’t need to. They have their sources already and just don’t care what the public thinks. This is not universally true though. Some of the newer platforms encourage people to comment or contact the journalist. They have subscriptions that give you better access for a small fee.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune says
“We try to make our staff easy to reach by publishing the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of reporters with their stories. Staff bios, with e-mail addresses and phone numbers, are searchable by keyword (such as Minneapolis, politics, education, etc.).”
ProPublica lists reporters’ emails directly below each story.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press lists reporters’ emails directly below each story.
I’m sure there are exceptions, but I do question the premise of this post. I have not had the same success with the Associated Press, however. But I’ve also been surprised when I email a reporter I usually get a quick response. That’s more than I can say for most academics (who never respond if they don’t know me personally – and sometimes not even then!).
Also Fox News has email links to their reporters on each story.
LA Times also includes email addresses when you click on the reporters’ names. Could this just be an NYT thing?
I want to register the same irritation. I can rarely find the email addresses of reporters, and I often have reason to contact them. Usually I’m just trying to help, for instance when a journalist recirculates a misinterpretation or some other innaccuracy that they don’t have the subject background to recognize. I feel a nonpublic communication is more appropriate, since I’m not trying to show them up but just feeding them some relevant sources or whatever.
Every now and then someone contacts me out of the blue and points me toward something I hadn’t considered in one of my writings; I’m generally grateful. Why should journos be any different?
Also the Chronicle of Higher Education. So – at this point I think we need to get more specific. I’ve listed a number of media sites that provide easy links to their reporters. Since others seem to have the same complaint as Andrew, please let us know what publications this is true for. I don’t doubt you, but it seems silly to look for reasons when the evidence is so mixed. I’d rather see where the claim is true and think about why those places make it hard while others do not.
Well, start with the NY Times. Some op-ed people do share email addresses, but it’s not the norm.
NY Times, AP, Washington Post? (I don’t know about the last one, but the gated entry prevents me from seeing). If it is these “prestigious” publications, then perhaps the issue is the same as the Ivy League effect. Rather than a systemic problem with reporters, maybe it is the elitist attitude of a few select publications.
I once tried to find the email address of a writer of a story in Commentary. The only thing I could find (without going down a rabbit hole) was the readily available addess of Letters to the Editor, figuring the comment would get to the author if anyone actually monitored it. To my surprise, they just took the letter to the editor and published it the next month!
In any case, I think that is the way this was they way it was supposed to traditionally work: write the editor, who essentially always has some public address. The editor can then forward to the journalist or not. I agree that is not a very good system.
Last time I did this in Canada it was pretty simple: click the author’s name on the news site, brings up a page with their contact information eg. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/author/angelina-king-1.5471817 I never heard back from them but that is cold emails for you.
The Boston Globe lists email addresses with bylines. Email addresses for all staff are available from the paper’s web page.
For newspaper journalists I’ve never had any problems. In my experience their emails are typically at the end of articles. I’ve emailed several journalists and often they reply.
If I click on an author’s name on a NY Times article, it takes me to a page with a little bio and on the right is a section with ways to contact them. One had twitter, facebook, and an ’email the author’ link, which went to a webpage. Another just had a twitter link. So maybe it’s personal preference there or some other factor.
Looking briefly at a couple of other places, my local newspaper had email addresses for both of the articles I opened. One was just a link but you could see the email address if you hovered over, and other had both the link and the written-out address. I looked at a few AP News articles, and there were no addresses that I saw on articles written by multiple people. But the two articles written by single authors had their photos and an email address for both.
I’ve had the same frustration. My best working-theory comes in two parts.
1. Journalists at big national newspapers (NYT, WashPo) are less likely to advertise their emails. Journalists at smaller (state and local) papers/magazines are far more likely to post it (at least in the places I’ve lived).
2. Not unrelated to the first, the average number of emails the average professor receives from random people (not students, colleagues, etc) in a given year is likely quite low, at least based on my n = 1 sample. But a journalist, especially those at the highly visible outlets, probably receives significantly more, especially after an article is published. And the content of those emails I would guess ranges from the insightful and “on topic” to the threatening and not-worth-responding-to because it’s so off the mark or nonsensical. If I put myself in the shoes of a journalist, I can kind of understand why they might not want to be too easy to reach, if only to reduce the number of crazy messages received.
There are solutions for number 2. Spam filters with a small investment can be very effective. Many of them can be programmed in some way to your preferences as to what you want to see. Some people can hire staff to screen email too. I would be quite surprised if corporate media organizations don’t have effective spam filters. Most large companies have to do this as a matter of security.
There may be market forces at work here too. Journalists outside corporate media my see public engagement as a way to grow their reach and influence and income. Corporate journalists probably think that’s the job of the marketing department.
“I’m not saying this is a conspiracy; I’m sure there’s a simple answer. I just don’t know it.”
Some (many) journalists may feel that publishing an email address puts you under some sort of obligation to look at your email. And they may feel that going through lots of crazy, abusive, nonsensical emails in order to possibly find something useful isn’t a good use of their time (or good for their mental health).
This has also been very frustrating for me in my experience of working with journalists. In addition to the utilitarian explanations given above, I would speculate that there is also a cultural explanation. For journalists, contact information is a valuable commodity (something that can be traded or kept for use). As a result, it may not be natural for them to provide their own contact information for free, and they might overlook the opportunity costs associated with not being easily reachable.