So I posted, er, wrote a Newsweek column with my take on the interview controversy that’ s been simmering lately. In case you’re not following the link, basically the story is that some bloggers are turning down real-time interviews on phone or F2F, saying they prefer to do it via email, or IM. An interesting issue, or so I thought, about Internet empowerment. My take was that they have valid points to make about what can be problems from the subject side, like misquotes, improper context, or “gotcha” quotes. But I concluded that the real-time interview is crucial for journalists to do their best work, and when journalists to their best work, it’s the reader who benefits.
I talked to some sources in the course of doing the column, most of them in real-time phone interviews. In my fairly brief column space, of course, I knew that there was no room to fully address all the points they made. Being smart people, they knew it too. Jeff Jarvis, though. lamented that we didn’t do it by email, so there would be a full transcript for those who wanted to dig deeper, and at the least to see the full context of what he said. (Separately Jay Rosen also emailed me with a similar regret that I couldn’t fully elucidate his point.)
Jarvis’s post is longer than my column, and he has taken the platform of his blog to explain where he’s coming from. The idea that a blogger can address an issue and clarify himself fully after being quoted in mainstream media is certainly a welcome development. But I want to make clear that just because the column didn’t have much of Jarvis’s voice in it, that doesn’t mean that my interviews with him and the others I spoke to weren’t essential. I think it’s bad journalistic practice to make your mind up before you begin work on a story, and in this case I certainly can say that speaking to Jarvis and others led to my writing a quite different column than I would have otherwise. In other words, I wasn’t just calling to collect quotes, but to listen to what people had to say, trying to keep my own mind open. I doubt that the interviews would have had a simillar impact if conducted by email. That’s leads directly to my conclusion in the column.
He also claims that is of great value to archive and even post the raw transcripts of such interviews. He writes, “I’d say that reporters who insist on doing interviews on the phone without benefit of thought, time, and transcript are robbing us all of priceless knowledge, accuracy, and context.” My contention is that while email interviews are easily posted, they’re simply not as valuable to the interviewer. In many cases they are not an improvement to the process of journalism but a step back.
No one is forced to do an interview with a journalist, and many journalists will agree, if there’s no other alternative, to doing email interviews. But they’re less likely to be useful. In any case, I do not detect a widespread hunger among readers to read dozens of pages of transcripts or listen to hours of MP3 files, for the backstory on a column they read in Newsweek, or even a story in the New York Times. To me the issue isn’t transparency, but trust. I hope people trust me to handle our conversations fairly when I speak to them. I also hope they trust me when I say that the best interviews are those where I learn something, and those interviews almost always are in real time.
Every journalist should appreciate the generosity of those who choose to talk to him or her. Sources know, or should know, that we’re not doing it for them. We’re doing it for the story. Of couse there’s some self-interest here in the part of journalists, because doing a good job is good for us. But I also say it informs the public. It’s our readers who get the benefit of this.
