No, not every registration page needs a checkbox asking if the user is a journalist. The vast majority of your users are not journalists, so do not burden them with another checkbox that they'll most likely ignore. If the issue is opting out of marketing emails, provide an opt-out checkbox. It's that simple.
The issue isn't opting out of marketing emails, its the opportunity lost from not identifying journalists correctly. There are often multi-selects / checkboxes asking if you are a 'Student/Decision Maker/Developer' (particularly for enterprise software) so adding an additional one in many cases wouldn't be superfluous.
Thanks for the clarification. This does make more sense for enterprise software trial signups where you have to go through similar annoying questions, but it's still a pretty bad signup experience.
If you have direct sales organization that really needs this info, it might be a good tradeoff in usability vs. revenue to make, but it's still a tradeoff.
Er, ok, so to help the .1% of signups coming from journalist or bloggers, we add a checkbox that's out of place and irrelevant to the 99.9% of actual potential users which could have the negative effect of losing signups from having some weird checkbox asking if they're a blogger or journalist?
Try to imagine if vimeo or YouTube, tumblr, Facebook, or absolutely any site that implemented this in their signup form. It just plain sounds dumb. User signups are supposed to be as frictionless as possible.
What a selfish idea that only serves the author and the small percentage of similar people at the expense of the interests of the businesses they intend to write for.
At the end of the day, what I'm talking about is segmenting your marketing database, into users, and potential link builders with 1 extra field that 99.9% of people don't need to pay any attention to (your words). As I've already stated, enterprise software, and loads of others already ask for a number of qualifying fields for leads, and this would be a simple extension for many.
I have in the past, received emails along the lines of 'As someone who has written about us before - we'd like to introduce our new product'. Which have been gratefully received.
It's common sense to build relationships with the people who can help launch other products, or help you announce features. If encouraging businesses to market more efficiently to bloggers is selfish. Well. I'm guilty.
Asking for a website URL in a users profile setup can give you the same information and more. Not a one-size-fits-all option obviously, but a useful one nonetheless.
