The Media Interview

Jason McIntyre co-creator, writer, and editor, of the blog The Big Lead interviewed on Sports Media Guide:

Q. Do you do your interviews by e-mail or phone?

A. Kornheiser was over the phone – he doesn’t do e-mail. I prefer e-mail. I started doing it by e-mail because I was anonymous at the time and didn’t feel like I could call a major journalist like TJ Simer. Why would he take the time to talk to an anonymous blogger. I started out by e-mailing eight or ten questions.

People are more comfortable with e-mail because they know they won’t be misquoted. They can be far more eloquent explaining themselves in e-mail. Some people aren’t wordy but they might be wordsmiths on e-mail. I much prefer doing e-mail interviews. That was a sticking point with Richard Dietch (SI). He said no.

Jon Greer blogs on B-Net - Catching Flack about when it’s not a good idea to insist on email interviews. He tells how the Ann Arbor News was writing a series about universities letting athletes take easy courses to maintain their scholarships:

The paper sought an in-person or phone interview with [University of Michigan] president Mary Sue Coleman, who would only agree to an email interview, which the paper declined. So as a result, the series ran without comment from the leader of the university.

Greer then offers his own take on some cases when it could pay for interviewees to insist on email interviews:

when time is short and the interview subject doesn’t have time for a verbal interview; when the journalist has a known track record as a bully, distorter or poor interviewer; and when the interview subject has something terrible to hide and wants to avoid as much scrutiny as possible.

Another voice weighs in on the email interview debate:

Being interviewed is usually a miserable experience. One can expect to be misquoted, one does not always have time to reflect on answers, and it can be very stressful. I try to give only email interviews now, after so many experiences with being misquoted – which is particularly troublesome when one is dealing with such a sensitive topic.

Author Edeet Ravel in a 2005 interview about her novel A Wall of Light.

One of the concerns people raise about email interviews is that you’re allowing the interviewee take their time to craft an answer, maybe even run it by some media handlers. It’s turned out to be a non-issue, I think, because interviews by email generally allows people more time to give thoughtful, useful answers instead of being under the gun of a live or even a phone interview. And the folks who give you PR pablum in an email probably would have had the same media handling for a live interview anyway.

The real issue, I think, is: who are you interviewing? (or from the other side, who’s doing the interviewing) An email address is not an identity, it’s the identity of a mailbox on a server (or an alias to a mailbox…). Even with a phone interview, there’s something to go on for the identity of your interview partner. Needless to say, all of this goes for IM interviews as well.

Tony Hung on Deep Jive Interests raised this flag in my mind when he talked about people faking friends on MySpace or companies paying to get articles voted to the top of Digg and then concluded:

Users of social media, and as it grows more prevalent, really, anyone who uses the Internet, needs to ask some fairly important questions on a fairly routine basis.

* Who am I really interacting with?
* Who is really behind this story?
* Who benefits from the promotion of this story?
* And above all — who has really earned my trust?

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?