Inlander:
It’s, increasingly, become a frustrating irony for journalists. Even as the internet has stripped away our privacy, the rise of the cell phone and the end of the phone book have made what was once one of the easiest pieces of information to find one of the most obscure.
There are stories I haven’t written because I could never find a way to contact a key figure. It’s one thing to say “Harold Sourceman did not return multiple messages asking him to comment on his alleged involvement in the goat catapult scandal.” It’s another thing to say, “we had no idea how to let Sourceman know he was going to be the front page star in a goat-hurling related controversy.”
Definitely an unintended consequence of so many of us no longer having landlines.
Dark Web?
Most people have an email address or Facebook or LinkedIn or, you know, OTHER WAYS TO CONTACT THEM.
(And, well, given how often I’ve heard tell of journos reporting “did not return calls” or “could not be contacted” for people who never got any messages or calls, I have little sympathy.
I distrust the entire lot of them, and it’s up to them to earn my trust back, not demand it “because journalism is so important”.)
When the power lines around here suffer an outage and nothing else works, our landline generally hangs in there.
Do you lump ProPublica in that group, too?