A-list bloggers are spurning the traditional media interview, says Steve Rubel. Instead of the normal procedure (reporter asks the questions, you answer them and then the reporter goes and writes it all up), the move is towards written responses. Apparently, Mark Cuban will only do email. Dave Winer answers interview questions on his blog. Rubel thinks this is fine and ought to be driven forward into new interview formats.
It’s fairly predictable of me, but I don’t think it’s fine at all. Here are four reasons why it’s bad:
(a) This is likely to lead to weaker published interviews. A one-hour interview can potentially contain over 20,000 words. Which interviewee is going to take the trouble to write that down? What a conscientous journalist does is take those 20,000 words and produces 3000 words that are cogent, interesting and helpful to the reader.
(b) It leads to delays, sometimes considerable, between asking the question and getting the answer. This might mean that the interview is no longer newsworthy and a waste of everyone’s time. For a major news issue, that means important questions can remain unanswered. For a professional writer, that’s also their livelihood.
© It leads to over-polished and cloned responses. These aren’t interesting to publish or read. What’s interesting is when people are challenged, actively thinking, perhaps even a little emotional. It’s hard to deduce a person’s personality from their carefully crafted, balanced email responses. It can even lead to responses that have really been written by the interviewee’s PR company. I am sure this has happened to me on occasion. If what the new media advocates are asking for is transparent representation, how is this helping?
(d) There’s an assumption here about power. The assumption is that the reporter holds power over the poor A-list blogger. Not quite sure where that comes from, to start with. Written responses, it is argued, are helping to put the power back in the hands of the interviewee. This alleged balance of power is not often the case with interviews.
Most interviews are with very powerful people whom the media ought to be putting on the spot. That’s why they are being interviewed. If somehow I interview the CEO of a major corporation that has just poisoned a village due to faulty safety procedures, do you really want him/her to be able to say, “I’ll answer your questions on my blog”? This is not journalism’s function in society. It’s supposed to question and challenge and expose untruths.
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Spot on, Ian.
Stonewalling is stonewalling, whether it’s in an email or a live interview, but it’s harder to do in a live interview, so I would agree that investigative journalism will have limited uses for email interviews. However, in the case of say, an author interview, email might actually be more useful — especially for the tongue-tied scribe.
George — that’s a fair point. I would certainly not go as far as to say that written responses are never useful. Just that I think that the considerable benefits of live interviews mustn’t be thrown out with the bathwater, or viewed as old-fashioned, as we start to experiment with new forms.
[…] I’ve been meaning to write about a recent post by PR blogger Steve Rubel entitled “reinventing the media interview,” and a friend’s e-mail this morning jogged my memory and reminded me that I hadn’t done so yet. His e-mail also mentioned a response to Steve’s post by British journalist Ian Delaney, who blogs at Two Point Ouch and is apparently writing a book on this whole Web 2.0 thingamajig we’re all wandering around in. […]
[…] Been lots of reaction to Steve Rubel’s thoughts on reinventing the media interview, including journalist Ian Delaney’s comments on email interviews. He lists four things he doesn’t like about them: […]
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