What journalists don`t do

An erstwhile friend of mine worked in a bookshop, and constantly regaled me with tales of what it was like dealing with customers. A customer once walked into her shop and asked for "that book about the African dictator". When pressed for specifics, the irate customer impatiently clarified, "you know, the one with the purple cover".

My friend`s complaints ranged from old women who held her responsible for story endings that they found unsatisfactory, to customers who were determined that Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach was in fact called The Seagull, by Jonathan Livingston.

While her customers were definitely amusing, and often required her to go beyond the call of duty as a bookshop manager, over the past few months, I have been treated to a couple of surprises as to what the public expects a journalist to be, and my friend had nothing on these requests.

A while back, after ITWeb ran a story about how Kulula`s booking system was struggling to cope with the load of hits after it announced a particular special, we received a request from one of our readers that we book her a flight. It was perfectly politely worded, and didn`t express any suggestion that she had contemplated for an instant that asking a journalist at a news site to make a flight reservation for her was a little out of the ordinary. Flabbergasted, we forwarded her e-mail to Kulula, in the hopes that they would sort it out.

Then we got back to the job of writing stories.

I am genuinely sympathetic with everyone out there who finds the glut in their inboxes tedious. I am not, however, the right person to speak to about getting rid of it.

Georgina Guedes, Journalist, ITWeb

I don`t like spam much. My lips are in proportion with the rest of my face, I don`t have anything I`d like to enlarge elsewhere on my body, and there is a fortune of money out there just waiting for me to claim, as soon as I have managed to source a "processing fee" for the efficient Nigerian gentlemen handling my transaction. I am genuinely sympathetic with everyone out there who finds the glut in their inboxes tedious. I am not, however, the right person to speak to about getting rid of it. There is very little I can do. Writing another article about why a particular spammer is bad will only provide further exposure for the menace.

There is anti-spam software out there, at a cost, but very effective. Internet service providers (ISPs) also have a spam blocking policy, so it helps to alert them to any offenders slipping through. Try calling yours. I did a couple of articles on these topics a while back. Search on ITWeb. I`m busy.

We`ve had phone calls from people who announce, "I`d like the Internet" or "I want this e-mail thing". We`ve also had calls from people who, having purchased an Internet access package from a new ISP, would like us to organise them a refund, because they`ve just realised they don`t own a modem.

That`s all well and good, but I`m kind of busy writing a story here. You know, writing, that thing I do because I`m a journalist.

A university student phoned one of my colleagues with a request for information. He was happy to talk to her on the phone, but she wanted the information mailed through to her. She hadn`t prepared any questions, she just kept doggedly repeating the title of her research project, which was to "analyse the state of the IT industry".

She was quite adamant that he should just write down everything he could think of, and mail it through to her. When he pointed out that this sounded to him like he would be doing her research project, she became quite indignant and told him that she had already missed her deadline, and he shouldn`t be giving her such a hard time.

Let me tell you about deadlines, missy. Being a JOURNALIST, I know all about them. I`m on one now. But hang on, I`ll take a few minutes to check my job description. Hmm, it doesn`t say anything about doing research projects for university students. What do you know?

Telkom posted a press release on our site detailing a new service offering. TI-DIS is an inexpensive way of connecting multiple users on a LAN to the Internet. The press release waxed extensively about stability and affordability, and it all sounded marvellous. However, the poor ITWeb reader who actually wanted to subscribe to this service found that no operator at any of the numbers given by Telkom had any clue what the reader was talking about.

Um, I`m kind of busy booking flights and organising refunds now. When I`m finished with that, I plan to write an article maybe, on a whim. Do you mind if I put this one on the backburner? Besides, all I`m going to do is phone Telkom, and you`ve done that already.

Dictionary.com defines a journalist as, quite simply, "a writer for newspapers and magazines". Travel agent, PR agent, client liaison officer, network engineer: a journalist is none of these things.