Earlier this year, I spent a few weeks trying to get a source to talk to me for a story. This is a standard way for a journalist to spend time, but unlike reluctant sources I’ve worked with in the past, this wasn’t someone who was shy or had something to lose by talking. My story wasn’t sensitive or scandalous. But over and over, our email exchanges turned into stretches of silence. Finally, after what I decided would be my last attempt, the source wrote with a phone number and a time to call. When we connected, she explained why she had been hesitant to reply. She wasn’t sure whether my email was a scam.
As a journalist, I rarely go a day without worrying about declining trust in media, rising misinformation, or publishers losing traffic to chatbots. But I hadn’t worried that the technological and social factors disrupting the business and efficacy of news delivery might also imperil a foundational element of newsgathering. Even someone who assumes all my work is fabricated would at least acknowledge that I exist.
The mix-up with my source seems more like an issue of trust in reality than trust in news. I don’t know what kind of scam might take the form of a journalist asking for an interview, but then again, I don’t know how most of the scams I bump into work. At least once a day — often five to six times a day — I get an email saying “Hi Gabe, this is [common American name] writing from my new email address.” I know it’s a trick, but not what kind of trick.
After talking to my source, I realized how much the prevalence of scams has already changed the way I report. I would wager that most people’s first knowing interaction with a chatbot wasn’t an OpenAI product, but a phone call designed to solicit donations or repay student loans. These robocalls made any unknown number seem suspicious, and now smartphone software automatically screens and blocks them. Sometime in the last decade, I switched to texting sources as a first outreach. This was especially useful after the pandemic turned desk lines into perpetually full voicemail inboxes. But the spread of spam texts has led even more people to put their phones on silent and leave messages from unfamiliar senders unread.
Email has been suspicious far longer than texts — fake princes, miracle lottery wins and the like were tropes thirty years ago. Now AI has made it possible for scammers to launch attacks that are both more widespread and more involved, making every interaction seem suspect. In the Today in Tabs newsletter, Rusty Foster ran down a few recent whoppers — including scammers who set up fake companies, complete with deepfake coworkers on a Zoom call, to get access to money or GitHub accounts. These schemes began with an email.
It was always necessary to go online with a healthy sense of skepticism. But now, outright paranoia is the safest position. The ”dead internet theory” — which suggests almost everyone online is fake — seems closer to reality every day. We have to install a Captcha in our brains to ensure anyone trying to reach us is truly a human.
While I hadn’t been suspected of being a bot before this year, I had noticed signs that sources were becoming more skeptical of email. As a freelancer, I’ve increasingly had to prove to people that I really am writing for the outlet I claim to be writing for, even though I’m writing from a Gmail address. I’ve since switched to using an email tied to my portfolio website. My hope is this will help me clear the first hurdle of legitimacy, though I know this could be easily faked (and is often overlooked by recipients of scam emails).
I’ve also changed how I write my outreach emails. Previously, I would offer a brief explanation of the story and what the source would contribute, offer to answer some questions, then ask to set up a time to talk. Now, I skip the offer to schedule an interview. My first goal isn’t to get a quote, it’s to prove I’m human. I offer a couple of windows when we might talk about the story, before we talk for the story. The reply rate to these emails is much higher, and most of the time, after a few questions that verify my identity, the person agrees to talk on the record then and there.
This is an overdue change for reasons that have nothing to do with scams, but everything to do with trust. It’s understandable why someone who understands online communication would avoid talking to a reporter or doubt a writer’s motivations. I’ve approached people at events who turn down an interview request with, “I don’t want to go viral.” More savvy sources know that there’s an audience ready to take anything they can out of context and spread it via short video clips.
Parachuting into communities, piecing together a story from a few social media posts, or going home only after talking to the most willing sources are all ways to miss the real story and to burn people who might otherwise be served by good reporting. As I’ve looked for ways to better secure interviews through cold emails, I’ve turned toward being as warm as possible. I don’t write with the expectation a person will talk to me, trust me, or even be excited at the prospect of being in an article (I also never send a long list of precise times to talk — that’s too pushy and demanding). I let the source have more control over their participation and I present myself as ready to address their concerns and curiosity. Increasingly, I find myself falling back to lessons from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center of Journalism Ethics’ guide to less-extractive reporting. The best way to prove you’re a human is by demonstrating humanity.
When my source replied to me, it wasn’t because of a well-worded email. It was because I did some more work offline. I had a mutual contact — whom I had met in-person — reach out and confirm I was real. No number of tips and tricks for proving humanity online can replace the value of cultivating connections through a community. It helps to simply be visible. Most people will go their whole lives without talking to a reporter, so it makes sense they might not trust an unexpected email from one, unless they have a relationship with the reporter or an understanding of the work.
The problem is, this takes time, and slow reporting isn’t part of many publishers’ digital strategy. But these digital strategies are built for an internet that so many people are calling dead. The answer to declining traffic and trust isn’t to shovel more content onto a homepage or to ask the same technology that’s scamming users to help write stories. We won’t seem more human if we cater to algorithms and bots. One reason why the dead internet theory is so sticky is because a lot of the content that’s online isn’t meant for humans to read, or at least not for humans to read first.
If the web is becoming a digital graveyard, then maybe readers, too, just want to hear from someone who’s real.
