Journalists Should List Home Numbers

By: Allan Wolper
"You have a collect call from Willie Horton at the Maryland State Correctional Institution."

My wife's heart stopped. She knew the caller was the killer-rapist who had been the star of a TV commercial that wrecked the 1988 presidential campaign of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Not the kind of person a woman -- even a woman journalist -- would give her home phone number to. But a story is a story. She interviewed Horton about his life as a celebrity criminal and chastised me for giving our home number to one more murderer.

My wife believes journalists are entitled to a private sanctuary. And so do reporters who examine criminal behavior. Still, the great majority of readers calling reporters at home aren't serial rapists or soldiers in a Colombia-based drug cartel. And 10 years after my wife's talk with the infamous Willie, our names remain in the Manhattan white pages.

There is a good reason for being there. Leakers appreciate the fact that they can catch a reporter at home away from the Big Brother electronic spying devices proliferating in corporate America.

News pages are filled with lines about sources who could not be reached for comment at their homes or offices. But I have yet to see a line in a newspaper about a person who couldn't track down a reporter because he shut off his cell phone or had an unlisted telephone number. Hypocrisy runs supreme here.

"You have to be accessible," said Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post who is listed in the District of Columbia directory as Robert Woodward as a come-on to future Deep Throats. "People always know they can reach me anytime."

Anthony Marro, editor of Newsday in Melville, N.Y., lists his home number as much to assuage reader angst as anything else. "When someone gets angry about something, I don't think they should have to wait until the next morning to talk to me," Marro said.

A recent survey showed newspaper editors are increasingly publishing the office telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of their reporters. That's not enough. E-mail and voice-mail boxes fill up. Readers need to speak to people, not computers or answering machines.

"I think that reporters should not only list their home numbers, they should also live in the communities they cover," said Chris Peck, president of the Associated Press Managing Editors, a sponsor of the survey. Peck, managing editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., asks his reporters -- except those who cover violence-prone groups -- to list their home numbers. "I do it," he said. "It is a tradition at our paper."

TV journalists are so visible that they often use their celebrity as an excuse to unlist their telephone numbers and keep their public at bay. And there have been incidents where crazed viewers waited outside studios to attack them. But what they don't tell viewers is that stations can easily patch callers into their home phone lines.

"I think that it is a pretty trivial issue," said Walter Cronkite, the CBS network news icon who once earned the title of "most trusted man in America" because of his airwave presence. "I don't think it has anything to do with journalism. Reporters should certainly be listed if it helps them with their work. My telephone at my country home is listed because I participate in civic affairs there."

Gabe Pressman, a WNBC-TV reporter who has covered New York for more than half a century, keeps his home number unlisted for his personal survival. "I do it for my family and for my sanity," he explained. "In a place like New York, there are literally 18 million people who want to talk to you. I just read all my e-mail and return as many telephone calls to my office as I can."

Armando V. Durazo, who resigned this year as editor of The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, kept his home number listed for symbolic significance. "We have to answer to the people," Durazo insisted. "When people call you at home, it means they trust you. They used to call me about everything from a missing newspaper to a misspelled word."

But after one of Durazo's editors received a series of calls from readers who wanted to permanently censor her, she felt compelled to do something about it. "There is a lot of corruption and drug traffic around here," said Maria Caltabiano, an assistant managing editor at The Monitor. "I unlisted my phone number after I got some death threats. We're only seven miles from the Mexican border."

Drug dealers aside, it doesn't matter whether a reporter lists his home number if he doesn't respect the people who contact him.

Eric Nalder, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who works out of his Seattle home for the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, explained why: "Too many reporters think they know more than the people they cover, so they don't really listen to them."