Journalism Advice?

I write for the IU South Bend Preface. I take about 2 articles weekly, depending on my school workload. Writing for newspapers has always been a fairly easy thing for me to do, but for the past few weeks, it has been getting harder and harder for me. My big problem is contacts. One of the most important things in a news story is your quotes- without quotes, it's not really news for me. So I find it rather....I"heartbreaking"...when people won't respond.

It's not my questions that they won't respond to, I wouldn't mind that. It's that, no matter how hard I try to contact them, I get basically no response. I usually begin with emails, because most people in the business world will check their business emails first thing Monday morning (after all those fun meetings and before lunch). I usually get a respond saying something like "That would be great! Call me at work any time during regular work hours and I'll talk to you!" Then I call and get a phone interview, or depending on when and where I call, an in-person interview (which is always better).

But not recently. For the past 2 weeks the final step hasn't happened. I have left numerous voice mails and even extra emails to people in a despirate attempt to contact them, and nothing has worked. In fact, when trying to contact the captain of the police force, I spent over 2 weeks calling over 50 times, and leaving nearly 10 voice mails and 4 emails, and got nothing more than a simple "call me during regular business hours", which I continued to do. It wasn't until I emailed my newspaper supervisor, who knew the captain through her work with the local newspaper, that I finally got a response, and fast. It went something like this:
Dani emails Nancy, "I need help, I can't get a hold of him no matter what I do, do you have any ideas?"
Nancy responds, "sure, I'll call him for you and see what I can, do , he should still be in his office for a bit."
5 minutes later, Dani recieves a call from an unknown cell phone, "Hi Danielle, this is Captain (Joe)- sorry I haven't called you back I've been really busy...Nancy said you wanted to interview me about something?"
The conversation goes on and she explains the article to him so he can prepare solid answers in his head for the interview, scheduled for tomorrow.
Nancy emails Dani back, "Hey Dani. I JUST got off the phone with him; you should be hearing from him soon."

Isn't THAT ironic? Would someone please explain to me why she had so much better luck getting a hold of him? Was it fear? Respect?

Another tale of my adventures in journalism this week goes something like this:
In a recent attempt to get an interview with the zoo director. A similar process and failure was attempted. I called her on Friday night ( I didn't have to email her in hopes that she would respond with the number, since I already had it). Of course I knew no oe would be there at 9 pm on a Friday night, but I left a message anyway. I attempted to call her back on Tuesday morning (since Monday was a holiday), but discovered that she was in meetings most of the day, but I finally got a hold of her on Tuesday late afternoon, just as she was running out for another meeting. We scheduled an interview for Wednesday at 4 pm. I called her at that time and she was on the phone, so her receptions said she would call me back. She....didn't.... I tried to at abour 4:30, but she was already gone to another tour group. We spoke, finally, on Thursday, and she was ready for an interview- but I was running to class so I ask if there was any way I could call her later. She suggested that I email her the questions and told me she would get responses back to me tonight. She didn't. So I finally called her back around noon this afternoon, and her receptionist told me she was working on it right then. I got the responses in less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately, they were simple phrases and copied information from the zoo site, and not real quotable material. So my editor and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to fgure out a creative way to present our..lack of a story which we needed to fill up the space.

I know I'm not the best reporter out there, but I feel like there must be something really wrong here.
Is it me? Or my subjects?
Am I not being clear enough?
Or am I being so forward it bothers people?
What am I doing wrong?
Obviously, for the first one at least, she knew someting that I didn't. What did she know?
Does anyone have the secret to contacting solid people for interviews?

I would love it if someone would help explain this to me.

I know this is not a common ProgressiveU blog, but it's something I find very important right now. Especially with the new school year starting, there are so many brand new school staff writers who are having enough trouble just putting the articles together. They don't need added stresses like this as well. I'm not new to the trade- I wrote in high school as well. So I can only imagine how these completely new people may be feeling, some naively taking on 3-4 articles with their full class schedules and sometimes part-time jobs as well. It's really nerve racking. So if anyone has any suggestions for us newbies, don't hesitate to post them here.

Peace and Love,
Dani