It’s amazing how one article can lead to another. So far, most of the stories I’ve written have been products of previous articles. The most recent example was in S.F. Chronicle, today, Monday.
It started out with an article I wrote a week and a half ago about how HP, NASA and UC Santa Cruz will conduct research together, not least when it comes to nanotechnology. After that article was published I received an e-mail from some PR-people who invited me to the IT Security Entrepreneurs’ Forum at Stanford later that week since I seemed “interested in cooperation between private companies and the government”. I didn’t have the time to go, but got two interviews on phone with a former fighter pilot who now develops flight simulators and a former Secret Service agent.
The article was supposed to run the same day as the conference. Then I got the information that the fighter pilot suddenly got called back to the east coast for some reason and wouldn’t speak at the conference as planned.
Since the better part of the article was focused on him, the whole story was stopped. I had to rewrite some parts of it but finally the article turned up in today’s paper.
Learnings for an injo reporter? Well, if you can, always try to have a back-up interview if you for some reason can’t publish your first interview. And listen when you get a call from some PR-people. Sometimes that actually can lead to a story.
Ralph Hermansson
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/19/BUG08ON6501.DTL&type=tech
No comments:
Post a Comment