How Sources Should Think About Journalism

A new booklet offers my thoughts.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

For a couple of years now, I have taught a course, mostly for graduate students of public health, about how to work most effectively with the press. I wanted to begin the course with a book (or some portion of one) exploring the relationship between reporters and sources from the perspective of the sources.

There are a zillion such books written from the perspective of reporters—from All the President’s Men to She Said—and I’ve happily devoured many of them. But the only book I could find written from the opposing perspective is Leon Sigal’s Reporters and Officials. It’s a half century old, and while its core analysis remains strong, it posits a professional world composed only of men, and pre-dates digital publishing.

So, in the last year or so, I’ve taken it upon myself to create a book—or more precisely a short booklet—that I hope helps fill this gap. It’s called Engaging with the Press: A Guide for Perplexed Readers and Sources, and it’s being published this week by the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, where I teach.

Engaging with the Press is similar in format and length to Elements of Nonprofit News Management, which I published through the Lenfest Institute for Journalism in 2022. Like that effort, it endeavors to be relentlessly practical.

What it includes

The new volume contains sections detailing the motivations of reporters, editors and publishers, issues important to readers including accuracy, fairness and the varying sophistication of coverage, and competing agendas facing both reporters and sources. It explores the differences when coverage is undertaken by specialist or generalist reporters and when coverage is reactive or the result of enterprise, as well as how journalists tend to think about the audience of readers—and the special audience of fellow journalists.

Along the way in crafting the piece, I was repeatedly struck by how much has been changed for sources by the time pressures under which modern reporters frequently find themselves—the result both of the emergence of real-time publication, and of cost pressures and staff cuts. Another important trend, of course, is how the ranks of public relations and other communications officials and staffers seeking to shape press coverage has grown, even as the ranks of reporters have contracted.

Who it’s for

I hope the booklet will be useful for people like my students, who can expect to be the subjects of press coverage or to work in aid of those who are. More broadly, I think it could be helpful to those in a range of executive education programs for people who have found their jobs include working with the press, and who lack training or background in such work. If you know of such people (or programs), I hope you’ll mention it to them. Even more widely, the booklet might be something of an advanced course in news literacy for anyone looking to get beyond the basics.

Many of the readers of this newsletter, as journalists themselves, will know the factual background against which I wrote, even as I assume that the readers of the booklet do not. But I would especially value hearing the impressions of such professional readers on the question of whether I have painted an accurate and appropriately nuanced portrait for the “civilians” at whom the work is targeted. Because of the lightweight way in which the booklet is being published, there should be opportunities to refine and revise it to make it even more effective.

I hope some of you may take the time to read Engaging with the Press. The volume is available in printed booklet form from Amazon and also as an ebook. An easy-to-navigate version is available free online from the Chan School’s Center for Health Communication, as is a free pdf download version. If you do take a look, I would deeply appreciate hearing what you think.