For one reason or another I end up talking to a lot of Journalists. Often they are working on a piece and just need a quote from someone, but more frequently they have been assigned a story on something I'm involved with and need all kinds of info and back ground and details. The thing I currently hate more than anything else is when these people neglect to do any homework at all. I have a quasi-celebrity artist friend who has a policy that if anyone asks him one of about 20 different questions - things he's answered a million times and have been covered in about ever piece ever written about him - then the interview is over and he walks out. He's done it in the past and I never quite knew why it bothered him so much... but now it's getting pretty clear.

Case in point: Recently I was contacted by a Journalist who was writing a piece on new city blogs that had popped up in the town he lived in. He'd found the Metroblogging site in that city and had gotten in touch with me for more details on Metroblogging as a whole. I could tell from the tone of his e-mail that he had only been to that city's blog and had never followed a link to Metroblogging.com and knew next to nothing about what we were doing. That's no problem, we're not hard to find, but I decided to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and spent about 10 minutes collecting relevant links that he might find helpful.

I sent him the Wikipedia Entry which is packed full of details, I sent out (slightly out of date) press page with links to other articles that have been written about us, I directed him to our "about" page so he could see who was behind it all, I sent him links to individual bloggers blogs so he could see more about the people in the city he was asking about. I also included some notes told him that if he had any follow up questions he was welcome to call me at any point. Now, any Journalist who is actually earning his/her salary could have consulted Google and gotten all of this info in a few moments, but for some reason this guy didn't so whatever - I gave him the info and he was good to go.

A few days later he calls to follow up and ask a few more questions. First thing he asks "When did you start doing this?" Uh... I'm pretty certain that about half the links I sent him included that info, but maybe he found a conflict and is just cross checking. I answer. Next question "What was the first city?" Are you fucking kidding me? Now I know this guy hasn't read anything I sent him and I start to get annoyed. Next question "How many cities does Metroblogging have?" At this point I stop and mention all the links I spent the time compiling for him that are packed full of all of this info. He replies with something like "Yeah, I saw those links but I didn't have the time to click through and read any of them."

Huh? His job is to write a story about something and he doesn't have the time to skim a few links for info about that topic? He was clearly wasting my time at this point and it was obvious that he wasn't paying attention to anything I was saying anyway so I assumed the article was going to suck no matter what I said and ended the conversation shortly there after. A little later the article was published and as expected it was bad. The writer missed the point on just about everything. I wish I could say that was shocking but the more of these people I talk to the clearer it becomes as to which of them actually know how to do their job, and which ones are just trying to get their work done and get a paycheck.

You want to know why bloggers are a threat to Journalists? It's because we actually have an interest in the things we write about and from a readers perspective that makes all the difference in the world.