At your discretion, how did you land this Patrick? Perhaps this can be better answered on your blog, but did the NYT contact you after coming across your article?
I didn't "land" this -- I didn't seek it and don't particularly want it. Folks in the media in several English-speaking countries abroad have been contacting me repeatedly for the last couple of days, and when contacted I try to say "Yes, I would be happy to do that" with the goal of improving the reporting available in English and averting panic.
As to why I'm suddenly several reporters go-to guy for this? The biggest reason is that I speak English and am accessible. They know about me because my blog post on Sunday got widely distributed abroad. (I suspect many of them follow Jimmy Wales, who retweeted it.) My blog has working contact information on it. Also, since the media are pack animals, as soon as anybody quoted me then I was a Certified Expert (TM) and so everybody else should quote me, too.
They really should be talking with the guy I talked about in my blog post who actually pushed the button to turn on the warning system at our clients out east. (Someone at the company found I had mentioned them and passed the word around. He sent me a message saying that reading it gave him hope and pride in trying circumstances. I would trade a hundred thousand angry emails from people for that.) Or they could talk to any city office in Japan and ask "So, what is SOP for this sort of thing?"
Either of those would be better choices than me. But, again, they don't speak English and they're not in reporters' Rolodexes. Through a quirk set of circumstances, I am. So when they call and ask "How much should we be panicking?" I say "Don't panic." (A radio station wanted my opinion on the likelihood of them getting poisoned by radioactivity from Fukushima half a globe away. I'm not a nuclear engineer. Of course I immediately said "I am not a nuclear engineer, but to put your listeners at ease, that will not happen." It's the right answer. It probably shouldn't be coming from me, but someone should say it, loudly.)
Thank you. I still hope Patrick responds because I wanted to hear the specific story. In what you linked, I imagine he was referring to reporters in information-hunting mode.
Original article submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319629