An experienced beat reporter’s inbox is a magnet for useful information. It collects praise, criticism and, most importantly, story tips. Sometimes it even pulls in a joke or two.
Here’s one from a recent e-mail to Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks.
No, I did not sneak into Ricks’ office over the Thanksgiving holiday and read his e-mails. He gave me this one. In fact, he gave it to everyone who reads the Sunday edition of the Post.
About two months ago, Ricks, at the suggestion of an editor, started giving his readers a peek into his inbox.
In a regular Sunday feature called, simply enough, “Tom Ricks’s Inbox,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter reprints an excerpt of a recent e-mail or e-mail exchange. Recently, most of the published messages have been coming from Iraq. They range from odd, like the one I link to above, to somber, like this one.
Former Washington Post Outlook editor Susan Glasser, recently promoted to assistant managing editor for national news, gets credit for the idea. Its beauty lies in its simplicity. The feature creates a nearly direct link between the source — who, in this case, is often overseas — and the reader.
“I think that, as intended, it gives people a feel of my daily e-mail exchanges about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about general national-security issues,” Ricks said in an e-mail to Poynter Online. “This back-and-forth conversation wasn’t really possible in previous wars, for technological reasons. But now a lot of soldiers in Iraq have access to the Internet, and so it is possible to stay in touch with guys on the front lines.”
It seems to me that this is a model other beat reporters could apply. Local government? Environment?
But connectedness is key. A lively e-mail dialogue between the reporter and readers/sources is the fuel that keeps this model running. Ricks, whose source list stretches for nearly 800 single-spaced pages, has got that.
If you do, too, see if you can find a way to make this work. To avoid burning bridges, get permission from your reader/source before putting his or her e-mail message in the paper. That’s what Ricks does.
And so far, he’s received nothing but praise from sources, readers and even his neighbors.
