Trivial question. Why do ESPN writers not have @espn.com email addresses?

They're all at Gmail or Yahoo or whatever. "Elizabeth Merrill writes for ESPN.com. She can be reached at merrill2323@hotmail.com."

Why? No other paper or big website is the same.

 

Perhaps you're looking at freelancers rather than fulltimers.

 

I'm sure they all have espn.com e-mail addys, but they don't want to clutter their in boxes with reader e-mails and spam. A lot of corporate mail systems limit users to 100 megs of storage space, which fills up pretty quickly in the era of attachments.

 

Actually, that's not true. I see FAR too many papers allowing columnists to get away with using their personal e-mail addresses as a tagline.

It's one of my biggest pet peeves, and I've made sure to bring it up (and get it changed) at every paper I've worked for. Strikes me as very, very unprofessional.*


* I'm not saying that using Gmail or Yahoo, etc., is unprofessional -- just that if the paper thinks enough of you to let you write a column, setting up an e-mail account under their domain name, just to maintain consistency in taglines, shows a deplorable lack of organization.

 

If it is like our place, you can't access the email outside of the building. During baseball season I might not go into the office for two weeks at a time.

That's why sources and contacts have my personal email, but my tagline has the work email.

 

I disagree. i think it shows accessibility -- here's my personal email addy so you know I'll read it.

 

My work email is set up to kick anything to my personal email.

 

The ESPN people I know all do that to keep reader and spam crap from blocking up their accounts and causing them to miss stuff they actually need to see. Most of them have an ESPN email and a seperate personal one besides the one that goes under their columns.

 

What everyone else says. The email addresses on stories are "reader email addresses."

I'm sure much of that stuff does get read, but it isn't where the bosses and their close friends drop lines.

I can't blame them to be honest. Would you want that many people flooding your box?

 

I check my work e-mail approximately 13.4 times for every one time I check my gmail.

 

A lot of them have @espn2.com addresses.

 

or espn3.com

It depends on the arrangement, too. Freelancers and contract writers tend to have non-ESPN e-mails, while the employees with bennies, I believe, have the official .com.