Why email might make news media interviews obsolete.
There’s much debate in the world of business news about conducting interviews by email, rather than by phone or face-to-face. Increasingly, stories are being built around this practice. Just recently, a Dow Jones reporter asked a trade association that I work with to participate in a three-way email interview with another group opposed to my client’s position on a policy issue.
The idea was to have each side read and respond to the other’s comments, and then the reporter would build the story around this back-and-forth email string.
I’m not quite sure this is journalism. It certainly isn’t a journalistic interview. Even putting aside the argument that how executives handle being questioned adds to the story, there’s still the issue of who is actually doing the talking. Is the email interviewee just the one executive? Or maybe it’s a war room with the management team, lawyers and PR consultants collaborating over every calculated word before they hit the send button.
Even so, plenty of journalists and media pundits think email interviews are a fine idea. They’re convenient. They help ensure context and accuracy. They let the reporter focus on what’s being communicated rather than on keeping up with what’s being said — which makes for a better product.
Perhaps the most important benefit, say advocates, is that email levels the playing field. “Who says that reporters are in charge of interviews anymore?,” writes media guru Jeff Jarvis in BuzzMachine. “Are interviews about information or gotcha moments? … Is it about the reporter’s effort to characterize the players in a narrative? As a subject, wouldn’t you be wary of that? Or does the reporter want to catch the subject in a slip of the tongue?”
On the other hand, reporters like BusinessWeek’s Heather Green argue that there’s enormous journalistic value in actually talking. “Since I don't know what these people know, a conversation allows me to do follow up questions,” she writes. “The way someone says something, the emphasis they give, these little cues and nuances prompt me to dig deeper into certain areas. We're human, we practice this ability to listen to cues all the time. It's an amazing thing.”
Even more importantly, a live interview can move the news angle in a different direction altogether. “Often they lead to stories that aren't exactly what the person wanted,” Green writes. “Is that bad? If the story is accurate, no.”
Which of course echoes Jarvis’ point about reporters assuming they own the conversation in the first place. I can’t count the number of times I or a client have been interviewed only to have our statements used in a story that was far different from what we had been asked to talk about. Sometimes the statements were used appropriately, many times they were way of context. But in all cases they constituted an ambush.
That’s what you call being interviewed for and quoted in a story you didn’t know was coming.
And that’s one reason why more and more companies are insisting that the only way they’ll go “on the record” is by responding to questions sent to their inbox.
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BuzzMachine | The obsolete interview
BusinessWeek Blogspotting | Why I Prefer Doing Interviews by Phone or in Person
