I have talked to a number of journalists over the years. I actually agreed to interview with Cade Metz himself on the subject of SSC before this all came out; Metz just ghosted me at the arranged time (and never apologized).
What I have always done, and what I always advised the people who ask me about how to handle journalists, is maintained the unconditional requirement of recording it: preferably text, but audio recording if necessary.* (I also remind people that you can only say things like “off the record” or “on background” if you explicitly say that before you say anything spicy & the journalist assents in some way.)
I’ve noticed that when people are unjustly burned by talking to journalists, of the “I never said that quote” sort, it always seems to be in un-recorded contexts. At least so far, it has worked out for me and as far as I know, everyone I have given this advice to.
* oddly, trying to do it via text tends to kill a lot of interview requests outright. It doesn’t seem to matter to journalists if it’s email or Twitter DM or Signal or IRC or Discord, they just hate text, which is odd for a profession which mostly deals in, well, text. Nor do they seem to care that I’m hearing-impaired and so just casually phoning me up may be awesome for them but it’s not so awesome for me… My general view is that if a journalist cares so little about interviewing me that wanting to do it in text is a dealbreaker for them, then that interview wasn’t worth my time either; and so these days when I get an interview request, I insist on doing it via text (which is, of course, inherently recorded).
I suspect you get much more practiced and checked over answers that way.
In some contexts this would be seen as obviously a good thing. Specifically, if the thing you’re interested in is the ideas that your interviewee talks about, then you want them to be able to consider carefully and double-check their facts before sending them over.
The case where you don’t want that would seem to be the case where your primary interest is in the mental state of your interviewee, or where you hope to get them to stumble into revealing things they would want to hide.
Another big thing is that you can’t get tone-of-voice information via text. The way that someone says something may convey more to you than what they said, especially for some types of journalism.
Good advice, though I should make clear that my discussion about avoidants isn’t about journalists, but rather general personality (probably reducible by linear transformation to Big Five, since my method is still based on matrix factorizations of survey data—I’d guess low extraversion, low agreeableness, high emotional stability, high openness, low conscientiousness, though ofc varying from person to person).
As far as journalists go, I’m not ‘avoidant’.
I have talked to a number of journalists over the years. I actually agreed to interview with Cade Metz himself on the subject of SSC before this all came out; Metz just ghosted me at the arranged time (and never apologized).
What I have always done, and what I always advised the people who ask me about how to handle journalists, is maintained the unconditional requirement of recording it: preferably text, but audio recording if necessary.* (I also remind people that you can only say things like “off the record” or “on background” if you explicitly say that before you say anything spicy & the journalist assents in some way.)
I’ve noticed that when people are unjustly burned by talking to journalists, of the “I never said that quote” sort, it always seems to be in un-recorded contexts. At least so far, it has worked out for me and as far as I know, everyone I have given this advice to.
* oddly, trying to do it via text tends to kill a lot of interview requests outright. It doesn’t seem to matter to journalists if it’s email or Twitter DM or Signal or IRC or Discord, they just hate text, which is odd for a profession which mostly deals in, well, text. Nor do they seem to care that I’m hearing-impaired and so just casually phoning me up may be awesome for them but it’s not so awesome for me… My general view is that if a journalist cares so little about interviewing me that wanting to do it in text is a dealbreaker for them, then that interview wasn’t worth my time either; and so these days when I get an interview request, I insist on doing it via text (which is, of course, inherently recorded).
I feel pretty sympathetic to the desire not to do things by text; I suspect you get much more practiced and checked over answers that way.
In some contexts this would be seen as obviously a good thing. Specifically, if the thing you’re interested in is the ideas that your interviewee talks about, then you want them to be able to consider carefully and double-check their facts before sending them over.
The case where you don’t want that would seem to be the case where your primary interest is in the mental state of your interviewee, or where you hope to get them to stumble into revealing things they would want to hide.
Another big thing is that you can’t get tone-of-voice information via text. The way that someone says something may convey more to you than what they said, especially for some types of journalism.
Good advice, though I should make clear that my discussion about avoidants isn’t about journalists, but rather general personality (probably reducible by linear transformation to Big Five, since my method is still based on matrix factorizations of survey data—I’d guess low extraversion, low agreeableness, high emotional stability, high openness, low conscientiousness, though ofc varying from person to person).