Nathan is spot on.  My experience in talking to several hundred reporters while I was at IBM about both contemporary and historical issues confirms his observations.  Often a reporter will want to attribute or even more interesting to them, quote you if you can express something in a pithy, clever way.  It is a trick I was taught many years ago that works.  However, there are often several ways of making the relationships work for both and we should try to work with journalists as they can create interest for our field.  Encouraging articles that are interviews of you about a topic is the most straightforward approach.  A second is to reach an understanding that what you are providing is "background" (their word) on a topic for which you are not looking for attribution. That makes you a "go to" person when they do future articles and in time you are quoted. That has worked well for some high profile publications for me.  I have discovered that sources are shared internally within professional media, so you can expect that a good relationship with one reporter will lead to new relationships they initiated with others and over time they will want to quote and cite you if they feel it will enhance the pop for their piece.  I have been told on more than one occasion that reporters do not want to quote or cite unknowns--that just wastes "column inches".  While reporters have lifted my material on occasion in ways historians would not approve, that does not mean you will be ignored all of the time.

One thing is for sure, that is a better situation than having a whole book translated and sold in another country with no royalties to you, let alone your permission to publish.  I had that experience at least twice that I am aware of.  

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 1:39 PM, Evan Koblentz <evan@snarc.net> wrote:
Dave-- you're exactly right.

However some journalists (like me...) are in between. I spent the past 16 years as a reporter for IT trade magazines, however, I also spent the past 10 years (top long!) doing primary research for my computer history book. While writing it, my challenge is to make it appeal to lay readers while being well-researched enough for the SIGCIS audience.

I hope to finish the book one of these years and introduce a new topic (history of mobile/portable computing) that really hasn't ever been covered in book form.

On Oct 7, 2014, Dave Walden <dave.walden.family@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it may be important to distinguish the 
"journalist"-historians who write books (e.g., Isaacson, Kidder) from 
the periodical-journalists who write for monthly, weekly, or daily 
publications. My impression is that the former do years of reading 
and interviewing of participants (Isaacson in one of the podcasts 
said he had been collecting material for many years) and the result 
(while maybe somewhat misguided) is mainly their interpretation (or 
at least good story); and the latter have a tendency to use less 
primary sources, interview people who have done research rather than 
participants, etc., with much more control exerted by editors (as 
Nathan said).  See Kidder's book _Good Prose: The Art of 
Non-fictioni_ co-authored by his decades-long editor.



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This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members



--
James W. Cortada
Senior Research Fellow
Charles Babbage Institute
University of Minnesota
jcortada@umn.edu
608-274-6382