Mailing Lists

Posted on July 2, 1997

 An AIDS conference is coming to your city? Why not talk to some of world's leading experts of AIDS statistics or AIDS education?

A debate has erupted in your city over police use of pepper spray? Why not ask police officers from across North America what their experience has been?

You can talk with AIDS doctors, police officers and all kinds of professionals and special interest groups through mailing lists on the Internet.

WHAT ARE MAILING LISTS

Mailing lists are subscription discussion forums or newsletters that come to your-email box. There are over 27,000 mailing lists on the Net. And, for journalists, they have several advantages over the Usenet discussion groups that are too often filled with useless chatter.

The very fact that you have to subscribe to a mailing list usually makes it more selective; therefore the discusssions can be of a higher calibre. Mailing lists -- unlike most chat groups -- are moderated and screened by their owners or administrators.

Also, mailing lists are user friendly. Once you have subscribed, the information will keep coming to you; you don't have to go looking for it. Unlike Usenet groups, you don't have to keep logging on and hunting through the newsgroups for relevant information. A good mailing list will keep delivering realms of neat stuff for your stories right to your e-mail box.

TWO KINDS OF MAILING LISTS

There are two basic kinds of mailing lists -- interactive ones and one-way newsletters.

The most common are interactive. Here is how they work. Any member sends out a message that is automatically posted to every other subscriber. Anyone who reads the message can respond or comment, and everyone else can follow the thread of the discussion. You can also continue to correspond to someone you meet in a mailing list through private e-mail.

So, if you were working on an AIDS story, you could hunt for a mailing list devoted to the experts in the field you need. You subscribe, listen in to their chat and post a message requesting the help you need.

Always identify yourself as a journalist and remember that anything you say is being "broadcast" or "printed" to potentially hundreds or thousands of people, so mind your libel and your slander ... and don't give away your scoops!

Once your story assignment is completed, you can simply un-subscribe ... and join a new list better suited to your next story.

The second kind of lists are simply newsletters. You subscribe and every day or every week you get an electronic bulletin. For instance, I subscribe to Israel-Line to get a daily digest of news from the Hebrew newspapers. Similar newsletters exist for the latest news from China and from East Timor just to mention two examples. I also subscribe to Netguide and get a weekly bulletin of the latest new sites and changes on the Web.

JOURNALISM MAILING LISTS

It is a good idea to stay permanently subscribed to journalism mailing lists. Any journalist can join the new CAJ-list ( send the message "subscribe caj-list your e-mail address" to majordomo@eagle.ca ) or CARR-L for computer assisted reporting (send the message "subscribe CARR-L your firstname your lastname" to listserv@ulkyvm.louisville.edu).

Subscribers to these lists can exchange information about the best Web sites, database work or their craft.

I have written to these lists asking for help in finding Florida corporate records, Japanese crime reporters and the best database software programs. You get answers almost right away from helpful journalists around the world.

Face it -- somewhere, some journalist has probably done the story you're working on. She or he can help you out and give you a few leads.

The best journalism mailing lists are listed on my home page.

TWO SPECIALIZED WAYS TO RECEIVE MAIL

There are several special commands you can use to improve your research with mailing mailing lists. Most mailing lists have the ability to archive and search previous discussions.

If there is a lot of traffic on the lists you have chosen, you can cut down on the bulk of messages. You can subscribe in DIGEST form, which gives you all the day's messages in one long message -- long, maybe, but better than 50 separate notes filling up your "In" box! Or you can subscribe in INDEX form which sends you only the subject headers of each message ... and then you order only the messages you want.

Finally, most mailing lists give you options for suspending mail while you're on vacation or away from the office or home

HOW TO FIND MAILING LISTS

Just go to my home page at click on the title: How to find the best mailing lists. That will bring to a list of search engines that hunt for mailing lists. The best one is Liszt which offers you a search form. Type in a single word that best represents the topic you're interested in and is likely to appear in the name of the list.

For example, typing in "AIDS" gets you nine mailing lists. One is for college financial aid officers, but the others are all medical or social discussion lists -- including a list for AIDS educators, one for statisticians, another for doctors. There is a also a non-interactive newsletter produced by the Centre for Disease Control that will send you a daily news summary of AIDS developments.

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

Once you've found the list you want, just click on the hypertext links in Liszt and follow the instructions. Be VERY careful. When you subscribe, you are usually sending a message to a robot computer so you have to fill in the information exactly as specified. Some commands require your name, others your e-mail address.

You will immediately get a reply confirming your membership and a detailed message with some basic rules. KEEP THAT MESSAGE! It will tell you how to unsubscribe -- a very important rule if you don't want mail cluttering up your computer.

Also, NEVER CONFUSE the business address -- where you write to subscribe or unsubscribe -- with the posting address, the e-mail address you need to send messages to other people on the list. It's the most common and aggravating mistake people on mailing lists make.