A recent grad shared the following experience and thought the rest of you might benefit from her perspective:
As a research editor, I fact-check articles, making sure everything is fair and accurate. I've learned that the best way to communicate changes or concerns to editors is usually through e-mail. Why? Because then there's a written record that I've done my job. If I tell an editor something really important over the phone, but it doesn't get changed for whatever reason, there's no record of that phone call. If there's any issues, I'm left stammering to my boss, "I swear I told the editor about this. Really." I've become a little insane about my e-mail habits: I save or "bcc" myself on almost everything now. Furthermore, I print out e-mails that are especially important and put them in my file for whatever story I'm working on.
This all sounds super paranoid, right? But honestly, if something goes wrong and an editor doesn't want to look bad, guess who's a really easy scapegoat? The young, fresh-out-of-college fact-checker. It sucks, but it happens.
And it almost happened to me earlier this week. Two editors called me down to talk about a story. I grabbed that story folder and headed into the office, and they started being all like, "Why didn't you tell us about XYZ earlier? Why is this just coming up now?" And I very calmly said, "I sent you an e-mail about that a week and a half ago." Blank stares. So I opened my story folder, and—this was so awesome—a copy of that e-mail just happened to be the very first thing in the folder. I whipped it out, set it in front of them, and then they were the ones left stammering. Bam! Awesomeness. I tried really hard not to gloat as one of them was muttering, "Oh, yeah, um, I must not have read this carefully at the time." Later the other one sent me an e-mail to apologize.
Would it have been as effective if I didn't have a hard copy of that e-mail? No. So I'll keeping using up paper and killing trees as long as that habit keeps saving my ass in ridiculous situations like the one above. And this comes in handy in other situations besides fact-checking. If you're writing an article or helping to set up a photo shoot, it's nice to have the instructions and later communications in writing, just in case there's any confusion later on. Sometimes after a meeting or lengthy phone call, I'll type up the summary and e-mail it to the editor with a note like: "Just want to make sure we're on the same page here and I'm understanding everything."
The only exception to my e-mail rule is if the information is legally sensitive. If I write something in an e-mail that says, "I don't think we should print this because it could be libelous for x, y, z reasons," that e-mail could be used against me and my company in court if we got sued for that story. Even if I didn't save or print it and everyone I sent it to deleted it right away, it lives on in the company's server. E-mails can never be completely destroyed, so I always have a verbal conversation with editors about legally sensitive matters.
Fun stuff, right? But you'll be surprised by how professional little things like this can make you look.
2 comments:
I totally agree with documenting to save your career. I continue to print and file e-mails to document progress on jobs I'm managing. There's nothing like being able to pull out an e-mail in a meeting that proves a client or source agreed to X and Y, or that we were waiting for an important piece of information from someone to be able to proceed with a particular job. Earlier this year, I tried for a couple of months to save paper and print less, and I am still paying the price in finding loose ends!
However, I've also learned that if something is really important, I can often get further faster by picking up the phone or physically stopping by someone's office to get their attention. Then I use e-mail to follow up/recap/remind.
Especially in dealing with busy people, I find phone and personal contact to be far more effective when it comes to getting their attention. I so appreciate with people stop by my office to remind me of things; more than once I have returned from meetings to be overwhelmed by e-mails.
Also, as a younger generation worker, I am wary of reinforcing negative stereotypes — I have heard lots of people complain that my generation doesn't know how to pick up the phone.
Angela: Good to hear from you. And nice idea--the phone. I am surprised how often even I avoid phoning people, though. Email is so easy, yet so passive. And it continues to amuse me that people will email one another from neighboring cubicles! Pat
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