Outside Voices: TPM Muckraker's Justin Rood On The Blogging Life
Starting out as a Washington beat reporter, I quickly learned the power of a cup of coffee. While most of my reporting was done at one end of a telephone line, I got much of my best stuff after convincing sources to sit down with me at a Starbucks.
It's not hard to understand why: Out of earshot from co-workers and bosses, sources tend to feel more free to say what they really think. They more readily develop trust when they interact with you in person.
Lunches and dinners with sources could yield even better results. As long as I didn't try to match my companions' scotch intake, I often came away with great details, anecdotes and insights of the way the nation's capital functions.
That was then, however.
For the past year, I've been reporting on Washington for a different sort of publication: TPMmuckraker.com, an investigative blog covering all manner of political scandals and corruption. And I've come to appreciate a very different kind of relationship with a very different group of sources, our readers.
We've never tried to calculate the number of e-mails we get from readers each day, but it's in the hundreds. Some are screeds, of course, but most are thoughtful.
Some e-mailers are of a kind with my old inside-the-beltway sources -- lobbyists, Hill staffers, government officials, high-priced lawyers. Many aren't. They're history professors, investment bankers, housewives and graduate students from all over the country.
What do they send us? The inside-the-beltway types send us good documents, gossip, informed prognostication. The outside-the-beltway types send curious articles from their local paper; a really good question based on the 18th paragraph of a New York Times piece that contradicts another article months earlier I'd never read; a sharp insight. It's like Christmas on the half-hour.
But reporting for a blog has its sacrifices. I don't get out to meet sources as much as I used to.
Also, the immediate feed-the-beast demands of writing for a blog are more stringent than those for covering a daily beat, and giving up an hour in the middle of the day to meet a source is often too great a luxury.
I'm also kept at my desk by the knowledge that the tips we get can be timely enough that an hour's delay will lose us the story. A small-beans example:
In the evening of Jan. 1, a reader emailed us a screen shot of his television showing a graphic from CNN's Situation Room -- a picture of Osama bin Laden with the text, "Where's Obama?" superimposed.
It was New Year's, and I was technically off duty (a distinction that, for a blog, makes less sense than ever). By the time I saw it, another blog had snagged the scoop.
It wasn't an earth-shaking story, but it was a good one. As a result of the flap, Wolf Blitzer had to make a personal apology to a U.S. senator. We didn't get it in time, but if I wasn't able to rely on my broad and active audience, I wouldn't even have had a crack at it.
No, the blogging life has no coffee hour. I miss meeting my sources in person. It's a vital part of reporting. But now that I've been on the receiving end of the terrific torrent of tips, questions and thoughtful notes we get from our readers, I pity the reporters who have to rely on coffee alone to get their stories.