Posted by Laurence on June 29, 1998 at 11:03:48:
In Reply to: Possible media blitz? posted by DJ on June 29, 1998 at 04:37:20:
Hi DJ,
I see from the time that you posted the message that you are either back on very late shifts, or now working in a different time zone. If late, I hope it’s working again for you with the clusters.
Gee thanks (?) DJ, you sure know how to catch a guy on the spot. I don’t know how good I am with wirds, but my spilling and speed of typing leaves something to be desired - just ask anybody in the chat room. Anyway, I would be happy to try and help in whatever way that you think would be useful.
May I make a few suggestions:
1. We need to get organised to carry this off. That means someone taking overall editorial charge and the rest of us then just doing as we are told. I recommend you take the lead.
2. We need to find the angle in the story, which will make a journalist interested in running with it. An “ouch, this hurts” probably won’t run – there are after all many other people out there suffering far worse conditions (as in terminal stuff) than we do.
3. The pure medical angle is also probably uninteresting to everybody but ourselves, our relatives and doctors - sometimes!
4. One possible human interest angle is this website itself, its creator, the search for information that gave rise to it, how it is helping people around the world and so on. This might just be of sufficient interest for someone to write about it. There is I think already a mountain of information here for someone to extract a story from.
5. I read what I thought was one of the best descriptions of what it is like to suffer from cluster headaches at the following site: http://neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu/forum/HeadacheF/10.17.978.18PMClusterHeadache. It was written by somebody good with words called DJ. If that was tidied up, edited and so on, it might well make an excellent introduction to a piece to interest a journalist.
6. If we are lucky, a fish will bite quickly. If not we just keep trying different angles (bait) until we find what works.
Let’s get in touch by e-mail. I await your orders, Sir! And come on, everyone else lend a hand here.
Laurence