Wordblog

 The debate about email "interviews" versus face-to-face/telephone conversations rumbles on. It is probably going nowhere but personally I see the email statement (that is what it really is) as a branch of PR — something every reporter avoids when possible but has to live with.

Email comments tend to be stilted, pretentious and read more like something that has come out of the press office. They lack any of the humanity which gives a real interview credibility. They are the spinmasters dream.

Steven Levy, in Newsweek, weighed into the argument, saying:

All this can be unnerving to someone (like, um, me) who has spent a career conversing with people on the other end of the phone line or lunch table. A live interview allows me not only to follow up quickly but to sense the verbal cues that direct me to more fruitful topics. In e-mail, people talk at you; in conversation I can talk with subjects, and a casual remark can lead to a level of discussion that neither party anticipated from the beginning. I am more likely to learn from someone in a conversation than in an e-mail exchange, which simply does not allow for the serendipity, intensity and give-and-take of real-time interaction.

Levy, interviewed Jeff Jarvis by phone for his piece and wrote:

"The interviewer used to be in charge, but that’s no longer the case," says media blogger Jeff Jarvis. "I can decide how long the quote is, I can make sure the context is accurate."

In a post responding to Levy, Jarvis wrote:

Irony No. 1: I didn’t have time to get into an email discussion and so I spoke with him on the phone. Irony No. 2: He uses a quote from me but I wish I had the fuller quote to link to. If I had done the interview in email, I’d have that context to give you now. But it’s gone in telephone ether, proving the point of those of us who prefer email interviews.

The point I was trying to make: Steven at first interpreted my stand as saying that I wanted to kill the old interview. I said that, no, I saw the opportunity, thanks to technology, to improve the interview. Why should journalism be immune from improvement? Thanks to email interviews, as I’ve said before, subjects can give more accurate, complete, and cogent answers to questions. Answers never need be misquoted and they need never be taken out of context; we can link to quotes in their fullness and in context. And for whose who want to read more, it will be there. Journalists should rejoice: The new, improved interview. And subjects should rejoice: They regain a proper measure of control.

Jarvis’s case could be served perfectly well if he recorded the phone interview (telling the interviewer he was doing it) and could then post a full transcript, if he felt he had been misquoted or taken out of context.

But I suspect that the real motive for giving email comments is fear of verbal communication. It is to gain thinking time: to polish ones own image or, worse, get someone else to polish it for you.

A huge problem with the email comment is that there is no guarantee that the person apparently making it provided the answer. Colleagues, press officers, friends, spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends may all have a hand in drafting the answers.

Reporters have long coped with something very similar. A press officer says the person you want to speak to is not available but, "if you let me have your questions I will try to get a comment for you." A bit later comes a statement in the form of quotes from the person you want to talk to.

The chances are it was written by the press officer and then quickly shown to the person who "said" it. In writing the story the reporter can make sure the readers know that the comment was issued via the press office and hope that readers are savvy enough to understand.

Email "interviews" are now also inevitable but any story that includes them should make clear the method of obtaining the information. Calling the resulting quotes "statements" would clear up the confusion, because they are not interviews.