Mark Glaser, a friend and columnist for the Online Journalism Review, has a small beef with bloggers, which he related to me by email and allowed me to share on this blog.
It’s simply this: an increasing number of bloggers whom Mark has interviewed by email post their interview comments on their blogs — before the interview even runs!
Mark says this has happened to him many times now, most recently yesterday when the irascible Jeff Jarvis posted his interview responses (scroll down) on Buzz Machine before they appeared in OJR.
There’s another twist, too. Apparently Mark sent Jeff an email that expressed some disappointment with this, and suggesting that an exchange between reporter and interview subject is understood to be private. Jeff sent back a note saying that in the age of blogs, no one should expect an email to remain private. (I may be misrepresenting Jeff’s thoughts here; if so, he’s free to clarify.)
Says Mark: “If someone is writing a story that quotes you, often it’s a promotion of you, your site, blog, etc. Why would you want to upset that journalist by posting stuff without their permission? I’m not really sure what to make of it, other than to take your advice and always put something in emails to bloggers like: THIS IS NOT FOR PUBLICATION ONLINE UNTIL AFTER THE STORY POSTS. I understand the transparency angle, but sometimes that should be counterbalanced by common courtesy. Why not just ask for permission? The interview involves two people, and they both should give consent for seeing their words posted somewhere.”
This post-your-own interview thing is spiraling into interesting new directions, and the trend cuts both ways. Sheila Lennon today posted an item on her blog (“Me and my different drummer”) recounting her email exchange with Mark G. and recalling the transcript of the New York Times interview she posted on her personal blog one year ago, which helped kick off this trend.
Now, here’s the thing. I’m one of the early proponents of posting full transcripts of interviews. (In January I posted transcripts of interviews I conducted with others, and sometime before that I posted transcripts in which I was interviewed.)
But to post an interview before it’s even published by the publication that initiated the interview is a slap at the reporter. (Afterward is fine, but before?) I’m not sure what’s to be gained by doing that. And you’re sure as hell certain to be crossed off his or her list of sources the next time around.
As for emails being private or public, that’s a big subject and could easily fill an entire column. Joe Clark had a very public run-in with the folks at Edelman PR for publishing their email exchange without their permission. And there was the case of the reporter (whose name escapes me) who sent some off-the-cuff observations about a conference she was covering (including comments that a speaker was kind of
cute) to a few friends by email and was mightily ticked off when one of them posted her thoughts to the Web.
My own view is that I think Jarvis is wrong if he believes any private correspondence between two people is fair game for publishing to the entire world. (I can think of many private emails I’ve received that I could have published because they were interesting or newsworthy, but doing so would have been hurtful or harmful to the sender.) I once mentioned to Doc Searls and Glenn Fleishman that I occasionally post snippets from emails to my weblog without asking the writer’s permission, and they were aghast (although I suspect this is becoming a very common practice). I still do it on rare occasions, when it’s fairly obvious that the writer is offering information intended for a wider audience and would have no problem with it. I generally email the person, letting her know I just posted her comments and that if she objected I would immediately remove them. Nobody has ever asked for a posting to be taken down.
As a journalist and a blogger, I have mixed feelings about all this. I’ve seen bloggers post email comments without permission often enough now that I’m circumspect in the wording I use to interview subjects or to approach potential sources. There have been rare occasions when I’ve attached legal wording to the bottom of an email that points out reposting my comments without permission would be a violation of copyright laws. I’ve done that only when dealing with someone who has ulterior motives or an axe to grind.
Having said that, I’ll also add that some of the bloggers have a point, too. Part of the attraction of blogging is its transparency. By posting transcripts, exchanges with reporters and private emails, people get a much closer look at the guts of the research, writing and reporting that makes up the journalism process. Bloggers complain that their comments are sometimes taken out of context, or that the nuances of their statements are lost when they’re quoted in an email interview that doesn’t involve a full transcript. So I can’t fault them for revealing part of the exchange with the reporter that led up to the publication of their words. The real bottom line is: Why did they feel the need to do this? Do they ascribe dark motives to the journalist? Do they think it’s important to scoop the reporter who’s interviewing them? Is it carelessness, lack of time? Or is it simply done in the interests of full disclosure?
I don’t know. You tell me.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
ARE E-MAILS PRIVATE?
Obviously not, as anyone who has been living on planet earth in the last couple of years can attest to (Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr., anyone?). But the question of whether an off-hand e-mail or other exchange between a blogger and…
I can see a smalltime blogger doing it moreso that an A-list blogger. The only benefit really is, like you said, getting the scoop or attracting traffic to your site.
Or maybe all bloggers by nature are linkwhores looking for a bit of traffic?
I don’t think I’ve ever crossed the line, and don’t think I ever will publish an email interview early. (my two cents…)
This is pretty basic I think… if you write about someone in your story and they have a blog you can simply ask them to not damage your story by pre-releasing their answers. If the subject says no then make a judgment call to use the interview or not.
If the subject says they will not publish it and *does*, then don’t use them again if you can’t handle their behavior.
Also, if you do a phone interview this avoids the problem (I don’t see an interviewee taking the time to transcribe what they said!).
Finally, I’ll take the pain this causes the publication over the transparency it gives the public (and that is as a publisher speaking). I mean, if the subjects of NYT articles could have commented on their blogs (or the NYT for the matter) about JB’s stories the trust in media might still exist. I was totally misquoted by the NYT business section when we renamed Silicon Alley Reporter to Venture Reporter. The business editor basically told me to screw off and that I was lucky to get the press even though AMY HARMON the writer of the story apologized for the editors spinning of the story. Anyway, I digress…
Long live bloggers, they exist because journalism is broken!
For me, this brings up the bigger question of “who is the owner of an interview”. The journalist normally initiates it, however it is predominantly made up of the intellectual capital of the person being interviewed. Who is doing who a favor?
Blogging and Interview Transcripts
Are emails private? And should bloggers scoop their interviewers?: I did an email interview recently, and I guess it never occured to me to post the transcript before my interviewer did (I never posted the transcript, in fact). “Mark Glaser,…
This is a fascinating issue. I was one of Mark Glaser’s sources, and, although I posted the interview transcript, I waited until after the article had gone live before posting.
I’ve written up more thoughts about this on my own site:
http://holovaty.com/blog/archive/2003/09/18/0207
I think the missing element to this conversation is that of common courtesy. Personally, when I email something to someone — whether it’s an interview or just a comment — I don’t expect it to be posted somewhere without at least the courtesy of asking me first. In a few unrelated experiences, I’ve had bloggers post just my questions, my questions and answers, and even just an email comment, without checking with me.
I don’t know that there’s a “best practice” with blogging, but it seems like one would be to ask someone’s permission before posting their words from an email correspondence online for the world to see.
There’s the aspect of scooping me — which is stupid for any subject of an interview if they want to be interviewed again. Most bloggers are getting something out of being interviewed, at the least exposure to their blog. Why would I want to interview them again?
But I think JD’s comment about “I do this and usually check with the person first” shows just how casual this is — it’s really a vague idea to bloggers about checking first. It’s just post an email, and remove it and say sorry later.
That’s stupid and makes the blogger and journalist both look bad. I am not a blogger, but if I was, it would pain me to see others flaunt common courtesy in the name of transparency.
I’m totally fine with people running full interviews on their blogs after the story posts. I realize they own their own words and all that. But in these cases, it had nothing to do with transparency and everything to do with ego and simple lack of courtesy.
If these are supposed A-list bloggers who want respect, they should show some respect to the people they work with. Or is this some exciting groundbreaking thing about blogging that I’m missing: the new new rudeness?
I’m going to shed whatever new media aspersions I have and answer with my old media, grumpy newspaper self: Use the phone. You hear tone, inflection, doubt, arrogance, humor — in short, you get more than information and response, you get a portrait of the person talking that adds context to his or her words.
If that’s what you want, of course.
If I were the reporter, and a one-on-one interviewee trumped my story by running the interview transcript in public like that, I would be damned inclined to simply not do the story (assuming I could maintain good relations with my editor).
Needless to say, it’s just reverse public relations by the blogger.
Glaser on media blogging practices
Mark Glaser at OJR has a new column up today on establishing media standards for blogging, keying off the recent SacBee v. Weintraub decision. Like I said yesterday, I think this issue is going to spark significant debate in a lot of newsrooms, and it'…