Someone explain this to me
At the end of every WSJ.com article is the author’s email address. For example, one article I recently enjoyed ended with:
Write to Thomas M. Burton at tom.burton@wsj.com
I emailed a WSJ author once with a question, and I received a thoughtful, complete response–pretty neat. But my dad recently emailed Tom Burton to thank him for the above piece, and he wrote back with this:
Thank you so much!
————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
To get any response from the author is impressive. But from his blackberry??? That’s almost unfathomable! WSJ.com has 931,000 paying online subscribers. If half the subscribers email an author once a year, that’s about 2,000 reader emails a day. An individual writer could receive 1000+ reader emails on the day of a popular article, right? And they’re all going to his blackberry? How is that possible?
That’s the power of the CrackBerry. It’s a monster, man.
good question. though not WSJ related, i once emailed Michael Lewis after one of his articles (bloomberg or nyt), and i got a paragrph response in under two hours. amazing response time for such a popular writer.
My wife (I can’t remember, does she had a codename?) once wrote Joe Morgenstern after reading his review of “The Departed”. She was incensed by the following comment in his review about one of our favorite movies, Infernal Affairs: “The basic idea was inspired by “Infernal Affairs,” a 2002 action thriller from Hong Kong, and already a classic of sorts.”
“The Departed” wasn’t just inspired by it. It was based on it, from the script to the camera angles. My wife was so annoyed by Morgenstern’s lack of respect for the original movie that she wrote a nastigram, sat on it for an hour, and then rewrote a more polite protest email. She sent it around 10pm PST. Within a few hours, Morgenstern wrote back with a polite 2 paragraph response explaining why he thought “inspired by” was appropriate language.
We never figured out how he could afford to spend that kind of time on a reader’s note.
Five years ago I e-mailed Emily Yoffe sometime after midnight in response to one of her Slate articles. She sent a thoughtful reply about an hour later from her personal Hotmail account. I was impressed. She has kids.
I actually liked “The Departed” more than “Infernal Affairs”.
i wonder if our initial assumption may need tweaking. even if i assume that i write one particular author once a year, i read articles by i don’t know how many different people a year. i certainly read more than 12 authors a year, but i don’t write more than 1 email a month.
Maybe somebody who has semi-regular contact with Jenny 8. can ask her what her reader e-mail flow is like.