When journalists are no longer off the record
Mark Glaser in the Online Journalism Review
Posted: 2004-10-12
More and more, blogs are giving sources the power to strike back and making journalists think twice about what they run in a story and how they conduct an interview. Case in point: Billionaire technology entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who also owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks basketball team, launched a blog last spring and quickly posted an e-mail exchange he had with Dallas Morning News sports columnist Kevin Blackistone.
While Cuban wrote that the best thing about a blog was that “I get to respond to the media,” Blackistone wasn’t too thrilled that Cuban had posted their e-mail exchange. “I didn’t think much of being surprised by having what I thought was a private exchange with Mark Cuban posted on a public Web site,” Blackistone told me via e-mail. “That is a reason I stopped responding to readers years ago, because I discovered they started posting my personal responses to them on message boards.”
The part about Cuban only doing email interviews is well known, but what intrigued me in this piece was the reaction of Blackistone - I hadn’t heard that side of the Cuban story before. How many interviewees have said about journalists what Blackistone says here about Cuban?
Posted: October 27th, 2006 under Email Interviews, Technology and Media Interviews, Tips for Interviewers, Transparency.