While the editors and copy desk of the Laredo Morning Times work diligently to get the next day’s edition ready, Dennis Silva, the Times’ sports editor, sends his story status without missing a single beat.
“IM is important because it is quick and efficient in allowing me to communicate,” Silva said. “It’s much easier than a phone call since computers are how reporters work nowadays.”
In addition to standard face-to-face interviews and brief questions and fact checking done via email, instant messaging is finding a place of its own across newsrooms across the country as a way to streamline the reporting process.
Offering reporters the ability to speak with sources in real time, IM has quickly replaced the wait reporters had to endure for a response to email or phone messages; as a result, the move has found support among newsroom managers, including those at the Times.
Silva says he uses IM most often to help transmit images and even story information directly from the field, saving time between returning to the office and getting his work to copy editors.
The medium can also help facilitate efficiency, said Amanda Llewellyn, a staff writer for The View Newspapers in Las Vegas, Nev., adding that it allows for assignment updates in brief.
Llewellyn confesses sometimes IM is just easier when it comes to tracking down sources, making it her “favorite way to communicate.”
“I have used MySpace IM to contact potential sources,” she said. “If there’s an opportunity to contact them straight away through IM, I use it.”
As with all technology, however, IM does have its drawbacks in the news industry.
“This reporter, at times, must force herself to participate in actual human interaction,” Llewellyn said. “I think that it is easy to become wrapped up in this digital, techno-centric age we live in.
“I think [IM use] can breed laziness…and you really have to watch it to stay on top of your game.”
