The view from the inbox
Been lots of reaction to Steve Rubel’s thoughts on reinventing the media interview, including journalist Ian Delaney’s comments on email interviews. He lists four things he doesn’t like about them:
1) No interviewee will take the time to write the kinds of responses they’d give in a live interview
2) Even a few hours delay in replying back and forth by email makes this format untenable for breaking news stories
3) They lead to polished and cloned responses - it’s easy to have a PR person smooth out your response and then feed five journalists the same email
4) The case for email interviews is sometimes based on a false assumption that journalists wield all the power in an interview, and email is a way to stop that
My overall reaction is that Ian is dead on when it comes to investigative journalism, but that still leaves many situations where an email interview can work quite well. For example, an author or artist may be a very poor live interview, but will go into much more depth and express themselve much better in writing. In cases where deadlines don’t matter, then emailing can work. As for responses being too polished, that can be a good thing sometimes, as long as one is getting the information one needs instead of slogging through a long transcript of rambling words and long diversions.
Oh oh, just had a thought - is “email interview” an oxymoron? I feel a new post coming on…
Posted: August 15th, 2006 under Interview Formats.