Getting Contact Information of Local Dailies

April C. Lavado

You have your written article. Critical decisions regarding publication includes choosing a section to contribute to. How will you be able to submit it to your chosen publication? First of all, you have to gather contact information of different publications. In doing so, the steps below will hopefully help you.

Remember that you always have to take the first step of the ladder.
Media offers you many ways to let the public know what they want to know and what they ought to know. To make things easier for you when you start working in a national or even an international publication, you have to start publishing articles in your local dailies first. A chance of practicing your skills in writing will lead to more good things for you in the field of mass communication. You have a chance to make things easier in your professional direction.

Browse through your local dailies.
One sure way of getting the contact information of the local dailies is by browsing through their pages. At present, publications are providing their email addresses for their readers purposes. Readers could send their messages or comments to the publication through this. But most of all, written articles could also be contributed to the publication by sending those to publications' email ads. The rest of the story is easy to predict. You send them your query together with your written article and wait for the publication to publish your article. The shift from traditional to on line media contributing has made things easier for contributing writers.

Ask for the section editors' contact numbers.
In order to know if an editor is willing to publish your article, you could ask his contact numbers from people who have his/her number. Then, you could send him/her a message asking if he/she is interested in your article. In this way, you could let him know about the article, why you wrote it and why you chose to submit it to that section. But in doing so, you must always remember that you have to be polite when asking the editor questions. Your editor may be approachable and really helping you out, but chances are very good that you will be taking advantage of it. You have to be careful to avoid problems with someone in the position. Focus on your work.

Make a list of local dailies and their contact information.
A list would be very helpful for you. Each contact information on your list should have a priority assigned to it. A strength of a list is that it makes you feel that your article has many chances of getting published. It is because you know that even if first priority on the list is not willing to publish your article, you could still choose to submit it to the next priority on your list. Move on from one priority to another.

As a 2nd year Mass Communication student, I believe that the Filipino Bayanihan spirit holds through in the media ladder. So, never hesitate to approach editors and ask help from them.