Civic Catalyst Newsletter
Spring 2001

E-Mail Extends Reporters' Reach

By Ken Sands
Interactive Editor
The Spokesman-Review

Idaho, known for its potatoes, neo-Nazis and outspoken politicians, was about to get another black eye. On a Monday morning in February, a state legislative committee killed a proposal to study whether to remove the word squaw from 93 place names in Idaho.

Once again, Idaho would be the focus of a racially charged news event. It would be the lead story in the next day's Spokesman-Review. As reporters began calling legislators and human rights advocates for comment, I sent an e-mail message to the 750 members of our Idaho Reader Advisory Network.

Within three hours, I had received 17 comments, representing a broad spectrum of opinion. I edited the comments into a 20-inch sidebar that added a community perspective too often ignored. And it also helped address this question: "Who voted these people into office?"

My mission as an interactive editor is to experiment with ways to connect better with readers. Historically, newspapers have had difficulty cultivating readers as news sources. E-mail, I've discovered, can be an effective tool.

With encouragement from Managing Editor Scott Sines, I started building the e-mail network in 1997 by contacting people who had sent e-mail comments to the newspaper's Web site. I also began collecting the e-mail addresses of readers who submitted letters to the editor via e-mail. A few reporters and editors were also willing to pass along e-mail addresses.

At first, I used the network primarily to solicit letters to the editor on hot-button topics for our Idaho edition. But I quickly realized the potential in involving readers before and during the news gathering process. As my e-mail list grew, I began targeting specific areas. I now have nine separate lists of names based on geographic locations in Idaho.

For example, I asked Kootenai County residents to tell us whether they had problems with barking dogs. By the end of one work day, I forwarded to a reporter a dozen e-mail messages she used as the basis for a story.

Another reporter was struggling to find patients of a small-town doctor accused of over-prescribing pain medication. An e-mail message produced several solid leads. Yet another simple query -"Do you have any crime problems in your neighborhood?" - led to an investigation of meth labs in an area becoming gentrified.

I spoke of these examples at a February forum co-sponsored by the Pew Center. In the audience was Jim Godbold, executive editor of The Register-Guard in Eugene, who decided to launch his own "virtual focus group." He said he is both startled and excited by its immediate success.

"I'm up to 75 members who range from anarchist to borderline white supremacist," he wrote in a recent e-mail. His newspaper quoted eight unnamed players in a story about a university women's basketball team, and he asked the focus group how they felt about the use of anonymous sources.

"Got some great responses...," he wrote. "Anyway, it was exhilarating. People were actually thanking me for giving them an opportunity to comment on such a high-falutin' journalistic topic. Bottom line for me is, this is way cool. These people are so interested in giving feedback to the paper, it's almost scary."

Dianne Whitacre, transportation writer at The Charlotte Observer, has been collecting e-mail addresses since 1999 and now has 1,200 contacts in her database. Her e-mail address is listed at the bottom of every story she writes.

When people respond on a particular query about such things as "litter," "left turns" or "gas prices," she stores their comments in a computer file labeled by topic. Then, when she needs the voice of a commuter, she retrieves names from the list and calls them for fresh quotes.

"It really zeroes in on a target," she said. "And it gives the story more of a personal context."

She also posts "fetchers" on the newspaper's Web site that solicit reader ideas on specific topics. A recent fetcher asked whether readers had gotten lost because of bad directions from computer mapping programs.

The response led to a terrific story. "We never could have gotten that information with man-on-the-street interviews," Whitacre said.

Last summer, Spokesman-Review Editorial Page Editor John Webster created a database of everyone who had submitted letters to the editor. About 40% of the 2,500 names included an e-mail address. A link between this database and the e-mail program became functional in March, and the newspaper is gradually opening it up for use by reporters and editors.

E-mail, obviously, has its limitations. The results of an e-mail query are not scientific, for example, and not everyone has access to the Internet. Sometimes readers "pop off" in an e-mail without thinking, and those responses typically aren't publishable.

But, in terms of effective communication with a large number of readers, e-mail holds great promise. Plus, it can be fun.