Have you been asked to compile a media email distribution list in the past, oh, say five years? Are you tired of getting fifty bounce-backs from a list of 55 reporters? If so, you'll understand how pointless the whole enterprise seems. In this era of newspapers and magazines shuttering in the face of a hurricane of bloggers, it's ever harder to depend on journalists remaining at the same publication from year-to-year.
Listen, I don't begrudge writers moving on to make a living, it only makes sense, but it sure makes compiling media lists an uphill battle. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, it reminds me of a dream I used to have as a kid: some unspeakably horrible black vortexy cloud would be pursuing me, chewing up the very ground beneath me, and I'd be trying to run away, but I seemed bogged down in one place, unable to move forward.
This is what compiling a media list feels like.
That's probably why I don't have that dream anymore: I already live the waking vortex nightmare of being asked to put lists together, so my subconscious is off the hook. I wish either A.) reporters were more in the habit of giving out personal email addresses (the gmail's and yahoo's of the world) or B.) that more newsrooms would assign their writers generic email addresses so that they can be used by the next writer who comes down the pike. Or does that seem like a death sentence from day 1 to be assigned such a Stepford Wives email address?
I know in this era of Facebook, everyone wants to have that warm toasty feeling of knowing the person they're emailing on some intimate-ish level, so I guess for those warm/fuzzy types, they like email addresses that make use of some part of their contact's name. But really, this practice has to end. Think of all those hours wasted researching the newest health beat reporter at Super Action News 8 that could've been used more productively.
Hopefully some publishing baron is reading this as we speak and will decide to change the paradigm.
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