Docs to go
Wear a flash drive around your neck.
That's the great advice of Mike McGraw, a Pulitzer-winning special projects reporter with the Kansas City Star. He stopped by Wichita for the National Writers Workshop here this past weekend, then gave another ses-sion Monday for staffers here at The Eagle.
The
reporting veteran of 35 years said he often finds himself talking to a
source who says, “Well, I have that document, but it’s in my e-mail ...
or on my hard drive.”
McGraw whips out the plug around his neck
“Here,”
McGraw said he tells the source. “There’s plenty of room on this. And
then we don’t have to deal with a FOIA request or any of the paperwork.”
One
part of multimedia reporting that doesn’t take much effort is providing
source documents for the web. Readers love to see where we got our
information and documents are the backbone of great stories. Flash
drives run between $15 and $25 per gigabyte.
Yet putting source documents on-line is something I still see a lot of reporters not doing.
And
the web content people love you when you can bring them a PDF or an
electronic copy, instead of a mound of papers they have to scan. Plus,
you can load it onto your hard drive and cut down on that stack of
papers that has been piling up on your desk for the past three years.
2 comments:
Danny
said...
Something
that's extremely handy to also have in the newsroom is a fax-to-PDF
number. That way, reporters in bureaus and out in the field don't have
to scan documents, and web producers don't have to use a manual
scanner. A lot of vendors will provide this service for just a few
bucks per month. I had a positive experience using MyFax, but there are
many more out there.
Ron Sylvester
said...
Great tip, Danny. I'm passing this along to our newsroom, as we build our on-line tools.