How to talk to journalists on email and Twitter

Editors and reporters have never had more people competing for their attention, but there are ways to get through, says John Rentoul

Nowadays many news stories come from tweets (AFP/Getty)

Don Macintyre, who was political editor of The Independent when I joined as a political reporter, once exclaimed in frustration that the news desk had “no idea where stories come from”.

What he meant was the deals that are done between senior journalists, agreeing to share stories, or between journalists and politicians. But in fact the prosaic truth is that most news stories come from email and, these days, from Twitter.

Most journalists receive hundreds of emails a day. Most of them are press releases (or “news releases” if you don’t want to discriminate against broadcasters and the online media). Different journalists work differently: I have a zero inbox policy, filing, deleting or marking as junk all emails. Others save time by not bothering; I have seen someone’s screen showing more than 300,000 unread emails.