To get information, ask a beat reporter

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Dave Burstein [daveb () dslprime com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 10:43 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: To get information, ask a beat reporter

Folks

If there's significant news breaking, there are half a dozen or more reporters happy to get details.  Often the easiest 
way to get official information on something like the observation about Comcast is to send a question or a lead to a 
reporter. More often than not, a reporter will follow up if you send over something that seems like a story, especially 
if you include some credible data.

   It's standard operating procedure for a reporter to send an email or pick up the phone to the company's pr asking 
what's what. For example, when Comcast's Joe Waz said Verizon was degrading p2p traffic in a way similar to Comcast, I 
sent an email over to Verizon and got an absolute denial from a senior vice-president. I was about to send a note about 
the Colorado finding to them when I got the news (I think on this list) that it was mistaken.

    If something's untrue and likely to become news, most companies will respond very quickly.
 I send out half a dozen notes like that every week, most of are not politically charged. About 80-90% of the time get 
I get responsive answers. I've got one working now where a $250M government loan was announced to an outfit with a CEO 
who was a defendant on a major fraud case and settled for $18M. It happens to be a good proposal and may well have been 
sensibly approved after considering the CEO's actions nearly a decade ago. When I started asking questions, the CEO got 
back to me within the hour. The government agency involved has promised a very quick response as well.

     In telecom the most active reporters include Om Malik at Gigaom, Karl at DSL Reports, the team at Telephony, and 
the beat reporters at the NY Times and Wall Street Journal. If the issue pertains to AT&T or any company in their 
paper's coverage, Jon Van at the Chicago Tribune and Jim Granelli at the LA TImes do good work. Geist at the Toronto 
Star is excellent. The Denver papers are great for Qwest, etc. Nearly all of these folk make their emails available. 
Mine is above. Reporters on most papers answer and return phone calls.

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