That’s what my inbox contained on my first day of work at Wired News. My inbox had been open for less than 2 weeks prior to my start date, so that represents about 10 days’ worth of mail, of which only one message was directed at me specifically (that I know of — I didn’t read them all). I’ve never worked in an environment where I received so much mail: story pitches, press releases, feedback on published stories, subscription requests, spam. Needless to say, my approach to email will be changing somewhat. I’ll no longer be responding to every story idea, or even most. Here’s how I’m dealing with email now:
- If something is important, relevant, and requires my response, I’ll respond quickly.
- If you are initiating an email conversation (ie sending a story idea, pitch, press release, or invitation) and you don’t hear back from me in a day or two, you can assume I’m not interested.
- If we’ve been in conversation and you don’t hear back from me, I probably overlooked, lost, or forgot about your message. Give me a couple days and then, if it’s still important, send me another message.
Wondering how to reach me, by email, phone, or snail? Here’s my contact info.
Auches, that sounds like a huge workload for you. I bet the interesting work should compensate though – as long as the work is as interesting as the articles on the Wired website, I think it’d be a nice job 😉
That amount of mails sounds a bit like the spam I tend to receive on my email addresses – the smart company I’ve worked for a while didn’t use any spam filters, horrible.
I freelanced for Wired and Wired News for about a year and a half, and I *still* get tons of spam from Wired’s readers.