Stupid Media Watch: Do Reporters Ever Think?

When I was editor of the trade newspaper iMarketing News, I was forever telling reporters that the most important tool they had was their common sense.

“I can clean up your writing, but I can’t think for you,” I often said.

However, I see evidence on a daily basis that many editors at even well-known publications aren’t having the same conversation with their reporters. Or if they are, it isn’t sinking in.

The latest was a story in the UK’s Observer claiming e-mail to be “broken.”

“The deluge of email flooding workers’ inboxes every day has become so overwhelming that it is now a ‘broken business tool’ in urgent need of fixing, companies have been warned,” the article began.

“The average employee spends an estimated 90 minutes to two hours a day wading through hundreds of messages, suffering interruptions and distractions with every ping from their PC or BlackBerry. Worldwide email traffic has now hit 196 billion messages a day, according to the research firm the Radicati Group, and is predicted to reach 374 billion per day by 2011,” the article continued..

Then came the money quote:

“E-mail is a broken business tool,” said Jason Preston, new media manager at the Parnassus Group, a social media consultancy, according to the Observer. “There’s been no innovation to separate the junk letters from the real ones.”

Huh? Has this guy ever tried a Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail account? I have four words for him: the “report spam” button. It is by far the most deceptively simple but effective innovation in the war on spam yet. Moreover, in combination with all the other anti-spam technowizardry in the marketplace, it works like gangbusters.

Given how quickly spammers change tactics, the speed of innovation of spam-fighting tools is nothing less than astounding.

But the real crime here isn’t that some new media guy is apparently unaware of how good the anti-spam tools at our disposal really are. No, the real crime here is the reporter who mindlessly delivered the quote. He did it, of course, because it fit his story’s slant: that e-mail is broken. Never mind he probably filed the story via e-mail, possibly from some remote location—an act that would have required telephone dictation not too long ago.

If I were that reporter’s editor, I would have asked him the following: Do you have one or more e-mail accounts? Are your experiences with them in accord with this article?

Then I would explain that if he wanted to keep his job, his head would have to come out of his ass pronto.