By Jacquelyne Taurianen
You are going to call Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist, said Chuck Baldwin, and my heart dropped. He continued to inform other classmates that they were also going to call Sinbad, the comedian and Fuzzy Zoeller, the golf pro, to get their comments about the their Wikipedia page.
I sat here and thought this had to be joke, does he know this is only our fourth day at AIJI? I wasn’t ready to be calling the real world; in awe I thought we would all laugh soon enough and would begin to work on the story related to John Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia speech. Nobody was laughing.
The class did as any journalist would do: We began to scour the Internet looking for any possible contact information we could find. Agencies, publicists and booking agents, any person who could bring us one step closer to getting a comment from our source.
Before I knew it, I was sitting in the Volante offices at the Al Neuharth Media Center, phone card in hand and dialing Coulter’s publishing company with hopes of getting a number that I could reach her at.
I explained who I was and what I needed to the secretary on the other end and she informed that I needed to talk to so and so and would be transferred. I waited patiently and when no one answered, I thought no big deal, I will leave a message, and they will call me back, right?
WRONG. After three calls and three voicemails, I have yet to hear back from a single person.
I learned a valuable lesson yesterday: Not everyone is reachable and many times you have to climb through a tangled web of workers, call menus and Internet pages just to have the opportunity to talk to a person.
In the meantime, I will continue to call, continue to wait and most importantly never give up because you never know when the person with all the information is your next call.
