Center for Health Communication
Introduction
“Engaging with the Press: A Guide for Perplexed Readers and Sources” was written by Dick Tofel for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication. It was inspired and informed by Dick’s Center for Health Communication class “Engaging with the Press: A Practical Look at Health Communication.”
I have worked in and around journalism for more than 40 years now, and I’m the sort of person who gobbles up books like All the President’s Men, and all its worthy successors—volumes that detail, elucidate, and celebrate the relationship between reporters and their sources. You can learn a lot from those books, but they have a common perspective: they provide insight into how journalism works from the viewpoint of journalists.
After watching officials, experts, and reporters flail during the pandemic, I have been teaching a course for graduate students—mostly in public health, but also in public policy and medicine, as well as a few undergraduates—about “engaging with the press.”
The course is intended for people whose careers will likely require them to do just that, at least from time to time.
I wanted to start the reading for the course with a book that described the process from the perspective of sources. The best one (and pretty much only good one) I could find was written a half century ago. It’s Leon Sigal’s Reporters and Officials, from 1973, and it’s an excellent piece of sociology, but the examples in it are all so dated as to be virtually inaccessible for many modern readers. To make things worse, it was written at a time in which women were pretty much invisible in the professional world, and the word “internet” had not yet been coined.
This is an attempt to craft a meditation about engaging with the press in our own time. And while I’m at it, my hope is to write not only for people whose jobs may entail working with reporters, but also for people who just read reporters’ work and would like to better understand what lies behind and drives it.
In this, I have tried to draw some inspiration from one of my journalistic heroes, Barney Kilgore, the father of the modern Wall Street Journal, and to a considerable extent an inventor of modern journalism. I had the honor to be Kilgore’s biographer (the book is called Restless Genius), and one of the critical lessons from Kilgore’s life and work was his determination to broaden the work the Journal was doing. One way that was often summed up was to say that Journal coverage of banking should be written not only for bankers but for bank depositors—in significant measure because there are so many more of the latter. Similarly, I hope this will serve as a guide not only for those who help shape news stories, but also for those who consume them.
I come to this project with experience on both sides of these relationships. Over the course of 20 years, I was responsible for press relations for a succession of organizations, first a major public company in the news business, then a fledgling museum, next a leading institutional foundation and finally a growing national nonprofit newsroom. Along the way, I also spent 25 years (many of them overlapping) in senior roles in newsrooms, first at the Wall Street Journal, then at ProPublica. In recent years, in addition to my teaching, I have had occasion to consult on a range of matters for another 40 news organizations. All of those experiences inform what follows.