I’d call it a net positive. Along the axis of “Accept all interviews, wind up in some spectacularly abysmal pieces of journalism” and “Only allow journalism that you’ve viewed and edited”, the quantity vs quality tradeoff, I suspect the best place to be would be the one where the writers who know what they’re going to say in advance are filtered, and where the ones who make an actual effort to understand and summarize your position (even if somewhat incompetent) are engaged.
I don’t think the saying “any publicity is good publicity” is true, but “shoddy publicity pointing in the right direction” might be.
I wonder how feasible it is to figure out journalist quality by reading past articles… Maybe ask people who have been interviewed by the person in the past how it went?
Thanks. Re: your last line, quite a bit of this is possible: we’ve been building up a list of “safe hands” journalists at FHI for the last couple of years, and as a result, our publicity has improved while the variance in quality has decreased.
In this instance, we (CSER) were positively disposed towards the newspaper as a fairly progressive one with which some of our people had had a good set of previous interactions. I was further encouraged by the journalist’s request for background reading material. I think there was just a bit of a mismatch: they sent a guy who was anti-technology in a “social media is destroying good society values” sort of way to talk to people who are concerned about catastrophic risks from technology (I can see how this might have made sense to an editor).
I’d call it a net positive. Along the axis of “Accept all interviews, wind up in some spectacularly abysmal pieces of journalism” and “Only allow journalism that you’ve viewed and edited”, the quantity vs quality tradeoff, I suspect the best place to be would be the one where the writers who know what they’re going to say in advance are filtered, and where the ones who make an actual effort to understand and summarize your position (even if somewhat incompetent) are engaged.
I don’t think the saying “any publicity is good publicity” is true, but “shoddy publicity pointing in the right direction” might be.
I wonder how feasible it is to figure out journalist quality by reading past articles… Maybe ask people who have been interviewed by the person in the past how it went?
Thanks. Re: your last line, quite a bit of this is possible: we’ve been building up a list of “safe hands” journalists at FHI for the last couple of years, and as a result, our publicity has improved while the variance in quality has decreased.
In this instance, we (CSER) were positively disposed towards the newspaper as a fairly progressive one with which some of our people had had a good set of previous interactions. I was further encouraged by the journalist’s request for background reading material. I think there was just a bit of a mismatch: they sent a guy who was anti-technology in a “social media is destroying good society values” sort of way to talk to people who are concerned about catastrophic risks from technology (I can see how this might have made sense to an editor).