For anyone who might, at any time, wish to contact me - as others have - and suggest or request coverage, here's a heads-up in case you're part of that percentile of society that treats others like total shit:
Although, yes, I'm a real journalist, I also operate
The Customer & The Constituent entirely as a "hobby".
Meaning, no-one pays me to do it and I don't make any money out of it.
The relevance?
When someone asks me to provide coverage of their achievement, topic or whatever - and you treat me like a disposable paper cup - it annoys me even more than it would if I were, say, a newspaper or television journalist working for a media enterprise and receiving a fortnightly pay cheque. They're on someone else's dime (whereas I'm not on any at all).
So here are some specific (as in, actually happened) examples of how I
don't like to be treated.
I don't appreciate it when:
- Someone emails me, drawing my attention to an item of mainstream media coverage of which their family member was the subject, offers me the exclusive opportunity to publish photographic evidence of an establishment's extremely poor conduct (because the photographs in question were too explosive for the media outlet to publish) . . . but then simply "gets busy" and doesn't bother to tell me they won't be answering my phone when I call to keep the arrangement
they made with me.
- The owner of a very interesting art-based business, keen to be the subject of a Special Feature, emails me a phone number and a request to call . . . and I call immediately upon receipt of the email, but their phone doesn't answer. I email back, and the email is never answered. A week or so later, another email rocks in saying how busy they had become (like, in the five minutes between my receipt of their email asking me to call, and my doing so) and asking me to call again. I call again and the whole process repeats itself. Several weeks later, another email arrives asking me to call again.
Try not to be a moron. I mean, at least
try.
- The Parliamentarian who wants to work with me on ongoing weekly articles in a Special Feature Series covering her area of portfolio interest . . . then, after the first one, allows me to arrange my entire weekend around her Sunday afternoon availability, only to "forget" the second arrangement. And who, regarding subsequent arrangements, would copy me in on a last-minute email to her assistant, to reschedule for another specific day and time, on which she assumed I would have nothing better to do than to be sitting by the phone waiting for her to call at this, yet another rescheduled time of her exclusive convenience.
- An interviewee (with whom I wanted to have a pre-publication fact-checking phone call) tells me to call him at 4pm . . . and I call three times within a 20-minute window surrounding 4pm, and no calls are answered. He finally answers and tells me he was in some impromptu meeting that was more important than the call he had asked me to make to him. As if that isn't insulting enough, he offers no explanation as to why, when he exited said meeting, he couldn't have returned the call that, again, he asked me to make.
So, RESPECT, OK?
