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Cornell Alumni Magazine has a wonderful interview with the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin and Businessweek's Peter Coy about their craft, and it's rare that I've seen two journalists open up about their inspiration, motivation and, most revealingly, sourcing.

Sorkin talks about the leg work he did to get his readers an in-the-room feel for his book, Too Big To Fail:

A lot of people do return your calls, but often people don’t want to talk to you either because the information’s too sensitive or they’re not interested. In the example Peter is talking about, there was an executive who didn’t want to talk to me. Finally I get him on the phone on a Sunday afternoon and say, “Look, I understand you don’t want to talk to me, I’ve talked to your friends, your lawyer says leave you alone, I get it.” And then I laid out for him what reporting I’d done. I said, “OK, I have you in [Morgan Stanley chairman and CEO] John Mack’s house on Saturday morning at 10:30. You’re sitting in the living room on the green couch, eating a chicken wrap sandwich his wife brought you. Your son’s lacrosse game started at 1:30, you didn’t show up until 2:30, and this is what you said.” And there’s this very long pause. By the end of the call he said, “I think we should talk.” And that’s how this happens over and over. The deeper you get in the reporting, the more other people become attracted to talk to you.

The piece's author, Beth Saulnier, did a great job getting the two to open up and parry off one another's comments, particularly in how they break down the complexity of finance. A lot of it echoed what I learned my first year on the telecom beat, so it might be particularly useful to reporters starting out: Sometimes naiveté about a subject can be your greatest advantage.

CBS Evening News is what many consider a serious news show, but I wouldn't have guessed it looking at an article landing page recently:

Or more clearly ...

That's a whole 80 words of text show up above the digital fold. Count 'em.

Compare this to the gorgeous, content rich NYTimes.com article page:

And that was a really good story CBS did, but it's buried under some dreck about Dancing with the Stars, flashing ads, celebrity gossip, say-nothing teaser headlines and Katie Couric's smiling mug, not to mention free ads for Twitter, Digg and Facebook.

Just a shame, that's all.

You know, maybe something like this:

Q. I was curious about digital newspaper distribution. I know most papers have their own Web sites, but do any have a virtual subscription? That is, can a newspaper be e-mailed, in much the same way it used to be delivered to your doorstep? I can think of many advantages to this means of distribution, as opposed to offering your digital content solely through access to a Web site.
— Roger Sollenberger

[From Monday's New York Times: Talk to the Times]

While the question's funny (most papers, including the Times, do let you get headlines or even full articles by e-mail), it's probably also a good reminder about how much a gap there is between what newspapers think their readers know about how papers work and what they do, in fact, know.

I used to get requests all the time, at both a very small paper and a very large one, for us to run reader-written "news stories" about one group or another. And why should they know how it works if it's not transparent? Nobody expects a car buyer to understand the mechanics of an engine, nor a computer user to understand circuit design. But we often assume readers understand "off the record," the Chinese wall, and all other sorts of slippery or even basic journalism terms and techniques.


...


Simply accepting pre-written articles sure would save a lot of time though.


Hat tip to Mr. Guess's GChat status

Related Reading:

• Maybe it's not so funny: The Times' e-mail preference is down for me

currently.

• And maybe he meant a print replica, like the Times offers. I used to make fun of the idea of re-purposing the print layout, but now that I no longer have print subscriptions I miss seeing the design elements.