Sometimes I email journalists whose work I’m dissecting. Sometimes I don’t. I once devised a kindness policy to guide me, but it proved impractical. The truth is that I’ve never once gotten a journalist to correct a story no matter how I’ve approached, and usually I get the impression that I’m just ruining their days by poking my head in. As what I write is never really about the individual journalists anyway (my interest is more in the institutions), I’ve largely leaned into not pressing the point. If they see what I write and wish to reply, they have an open invite to do so via my corrections Typeform (or via Twitter). But if they don’t (none ever have), I’m not overly keen on forcing them. As I note in this story, I generally leave their names out of the text unless there's a strong reason to include it, largely because I really don't want my teardowns to ever become first-page results for direct name searches on Google.
I chose to email the authors here because I had lots of questions and because I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe I was missing something. Many times there's really no ambiguity so that step isn't necessary. In those cases I rarely email/DM anymore.
(I'm open for feedback here. Approach is difficult! I want people to have a fair chance to defend their work. It's just tough to balance that against upsetting them for no obvious upside. I'll also note that no journalist has ever given me notice before writing about my work -- barring one interview request from NYMag -- so it's not clear what the norm is.)
*A PS about approach.*
Sometimes I email journalists whose work I’m dissecting. Sometimes I don’t. I once devised a kindness policy to guide me, but it proved impractical. The truth is that I’ve never once gotten a journalist to correct a story no matter how I’ve approached, and usually I get the impression that I’m just ruining their days by poking my head in. As what I write is never really about the individual journalists anyway (my interest is more in the institutions), I’ve largely leaned into not pressing the point. If they see what I write and wish to reply, they have an open invite to do so via my corrections Typeform (or via Twitter). But if they don’t (none ever have), I’m not overly keen on forcing them. As I note in this story, I generally leave their names out of the text unless there's a strong reason to include it, largely because I really don't want my teardowns to ever become first-page results for direct name searches on Google.
I chose to email the authors here because I had lots of questions and because I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe I was missing something. Many times there's really no ambiguity so that step isn't necessary. In those cases I rarely email/DM anymore.
(I'm open for feedback here. Approach is difficult! I want people to have a fair chance to defend their work. It's just tough to balance that against upsetting them for no obvious upside. I'll also note that no journalist has ever given me notice before writing about my work -- barring one interview request from NYMag -- so it's not clear what the norm is.)
https://rightbrain.quora.com/A-Kindness-Policy