What's wrong with email interviews?

Poynter reports that a growing number of campus newspapers have decided to ban email interviews.  The latest is the University of South Florida.  Why?

 In a letter to readers Monday, Editor-in-Chief Divya Kumar said an increasing number of sources are requesting email interviews in hopes of having more control over their message.

As a newspaper, is it our job to provide readers with the truth, directly from the source — not from the strategically coordinated voices of public relations staff or prescreened e-mail answers.

We don’t think these responses provide our readers with the unvarnished truth, and we will no longer include them in our articles at the expense of compromising the integrity of the information we provide. University departments do not have one, centralized voice, but rather are made up of a multitude of diverse perspectives.

Other universities, such as Princeton and Stanford also veto email interviews:

Princeton University’s The Daily Princetonian did so last September, saying email interviews have “resulted in stories filled with stilted, manicured quotes that often hide any real meaning and make it extremely difficult for reporters to ask follow-up questions or build relationships with sources.”

Sure, email interviews can be convenient for fact-checking purposes or follow-up questions -- or for setting up initial interviews.  But the information you get via email always has to be slightly suspect -- and incomplete.  Plus, there's this:  even under the best of circumstances, sources will not only be tempted to varnish their replies, but are likely to keep their answers short and sweet, simply because it's more work to write a long answer than it might be to relay the same information via a phone call or in-person interview.

And, as the late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings said back in 2001, -->

"The Internet is a great research tool, but when it comes right down to it, the thing that bothers me is I'm never quite sure if I'm talking to a goat."

To quote or not to quote...

That is always the question.  But there's a new wrinkle, according to this piece in Monday's New York Times by media writer David Carr.  He is disturbed by the increasing practice of news sources insisting on reviewing their quotes before publication.  He calls it "The Puppetry of Quotation Approval".  Read the whole column here.

Here's a taste:

Within the past year, I’ve had a communications executive at a media company ask me to run quotations by him after an interview with the chief executive. I’ve had analysts, who are in the business of giving their opinion, ask me to e-mail the portion of the conversation that I intended to print. And not long ago, a spokesman, someone paid to talk, refused to put his name to a statement. Most of the time I push back, but if it’s something I feel I absolutely need, I start negotiating.

As someone who has covered Hollywood, I can’t begin to catalog the number of distasteful communications customs in that industry. And reporters I spoke to said Wall Street companies have been trying to negotiate quotations for a decade, in part because one poorly chosen word could cost millions or even billions. But now it is leaking into all corners of the kingdom.

Including government and politics.  And there's something else that can kill the truth of a story:  email interviews.  More from Carr:

But something else more modern and insidious is under way. In an effort to get it first, reporters sometimes cut corners, sending questions by e-mail and taking responses the same way. What is lost is the back-and-forth, the follow-up question, the possibility that something unrehearsed will make it into the article. Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth.

All of which tends to serve the source, rather than the public interest.  Trouble, yes? Especially in an election season.  Back to Carr for the last word(s):

It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: The first draft of history should not be rewritten by the people who make it.

 Indeed.  bk

bk