Journalists fight for openness in government, business, universities, religious institutions and pretty much everyone we cover. But transparency for us? Not so fast.
I hope no one was walking by my office when I was reading Paul Bradshaw’s post at Poynter Online, about a journalist who interviewed him by email, then denied him permission to post the exchange online. I’m sure my mouth was agape, stunned at the journalist’s nerve and cluelessness.
Bradshaw asked, in the headline and in his post, “Who owns the interview?” He was more respectful than I might have been of the journalist’s wishes, pushing her to let him publish the exchange but honoring her wishes when she insisted that he not publish her questions.
Here’s my notice to all journalists who might interview me in the future about anything (and I do get interviewed fairly often): We are both on the record the whole time unless someone specifies that something should be confidential, or at least embargoed. (In most cases, I probably would avoid writing about an interview with a journalist until after the journalist had published, and would certainly respect such an embargo, if requested. The one exception: If it were a hostile interview, I might have no reservations about taking the first shot.)
As Bradshaw wanted to do, I have blogged about interactions with others, whether in discussions or emails (recent examples: my posts about journalism curriculum and geotagging). If you’re interviewing a journalist, you should presume that he or she might write about the exchange.
Bradshaw doesn’t say whether the journalist’s emailed questions included one of those long lawyer-written disclaimers saying everything in the message was confidential. But without one of them, I would say the journalist has no grounds for claiming that questions emailed to a source must remain confidential. Even with the disclaimer, I think the journalist should presume that anything you say in an email might become public.
After Farnaz Fassihi’s email to friends about life in Baghdad went public in 2004, I thought every journalist had fair warning that anything we email might become public. When you hit send, you pretty much lose control of an email.
Any journalist who uses email for interviews should understand that using email gives the source the ability to prove that you asked a manipulative or opinionated question (if you did) or that you used an answer out of context (if you did, and if the question might provide some context for the answer that your story didn’t). If you and the source later have a dispute about what was asked and answered and what you promised or didn’t about the direction of the story, you would be in a ridiculous position claiming that the source can’t use your emails.
What if, at the end of this email exchange, Bradshaw had told the journalist she couldn’t use his name? She would have argued (correctly) that he knew this was an interview and if he wanted anything to be confidential, he needed to say so up front. Journalists rarely grant confidentiality to a source after the interview (an exception might be a juvenile, someone who isn’t fluent in your language or someone not used to dealing with the media who gives some indication of not having understood that the interview was for publication in the first place). So how does a journalist claim after the fact that something was to be private?
My answer to Bradshaw is that anything a journalist emails to you without an agreement of confidentiality is yours to publish. As a courtesy, you probably shouldn’t scoop the journalist on her own story if she was courteous to you.
Every journalist should have the experience of being written about. I hope Paul Bradshaw publishes his exchange with this reporter. I hope she realizes that she should publish the full exchange. Don’t put something in writing, especially in the digital age, that you’re not willing to see published.
As journalists, we ask a lot of our sources and demand a huge amount of trust – that we will represent them fairly and to the best of our ability.
And I agree with your point.
Nonetheless, I can understand the journalist’s shock – maybe even initial reaction.
I also think it would have been fair to tell the journalist the interview would be posted online before the interview takes place.
I may assume a reporter/blogger would mention the interview in an online post but to put the whole thing online would come from left field for me.
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I can see how that might come as a surprise. But I can also see where Paul might not have been thinking all along about doing a blog post. But as the two exchange questions and answers, he would think this should be something to exchange. I say the journalist asking the questions would have the responsibility to state that something was confidential (an odd thing to do when you’re asking someone to speak for publication).
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What if we drag copyright into the mess? Either party might have asserted copyright over the content of their own e-mails, though it sounds as if neither one did. What if a source, or an interviewer in a case like the one at hand, did so, either at the outset or later in the exchange?
We’ll likely have to deal with this sooner or later. Ugh.
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OK, I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine that copyright would come into play here. If a reporter is emailing questions to a source for the expressed purpose of writing a story, responding to those questions certainly carries with it a grant of permission, unless you claim something at the outset (in which case, the reporter would work it out with you or find another source). And I can’t imagine that you couldn’t succeed with a fair use defense for using a reporter’s questions in a Q&A format with your own answers.
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It seems like a reasonable argument that when interviewing a journalist, the implied copyright license goes both ways.
However, i could argue that email conversations fall under the same rules as phones regarding one-party consent to recording in many states. That presumably also includes the ability to redistribute your recording, but you’d need to aak a lawyer.
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[…] uses the case to ask the question, “Who owns the interview?” Steve Buttry says the reporter loses control over the interview as soon she hits the “send” guys and […]
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[…] Steve Buttry wrote about the Bradshaw Exchange on his blog, saying: “Every journalist should have the experience of being written about. I hope […]
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I feel like this is a problem that extends beyond the interview. Journalists—particularly investigative journalists—are driven by “pulling back the curtain” on various agencies, people, etc., but don’t want to let readers into their behind-the-scenes processes. So essentially, they’re selling exclusive access on the basis that “people want/need to know this” and then turning around and saying “oh, but they can’t know about me/us/the news org.”
People do want to see inside the newsroom and they want to feel like they’re part of the process. News orgs are denying that because, well, that’s not how it was done in the print days, but in doing so, they’re (inadvertently or otherwise) turning away a huge segment of potential advocates.
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Absolutely. When I pulled back the curtain a bit in my reporting days (showing someone how meticulously I verified information by contacting them to do so), it always built credibility.
It’s interesting in this case that the reporter didn’t mind revealing her position on the issue to Bradshaw, but feels as though she must shield it from the public.
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Hi, Steve.
I’ve been wrestling with this particular issue for years, and first posted about it in 2005:
Reporters: Are YOU ‘On the Record’?
– http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=81653
If you want to see some REAL journalistic arrogance in action, check out the comment to that post I received from one newspaper business editor:
“The reporter is taking the initiative to establish the conversation for their purposes of publication. If you’d like to do the same, then it’s YOUR responsibility to take your own initiative to establish a separate conversation. Suggesting you’re going to piggy-back on the reporter’s hard work in developing an idea, identifying sources and establishing a conversation with someone such as yourself is borderline unethical. If you don’t like the rules of engagement, then decline the interview.
Sincerely,
Matt Branaugh
Assistant business editor
Daily Camera
————-
My response to him:
…I disagree completely with this. What “rules of engagement?” Where does it say that a source is forbidden to mention a media interview until the story is published?
Reality check: A reporter does not “own” a conversation or interview. The reporter is calling me to request my information or assistance with a story. That makes it a two-way exchange from the start.
What about the reporter “piggybacking” on MY hard work or expertise by interviewing for a story which will definitely benefit the paper, but may or may not offer me any benefit?
It’s all a matter of perspective. I personally don’t see any basis for news organizations to claim ownership over or embargo status for interviews (especially on generic topics), absent a specific agreement to that effect.
If a reporter is indeed working on a story which would be sensitive for competitive or other reasons prior to publication, then as a source I’d be open to the reporter negotiating with me not to blog about the interview until after the story is published. Like I said, NEGOTIATION is the key. Reporters and editors should learn to negotiate on this.
Also, what about the benefit to the news organization of bloggers generating interest in an upcoming story, especially if it’s on a general topic? In some cases that could offer considerable benefit to news organizations. Where’s the balance of power and potential value then? It can cut both ways.
– Amy Gahran
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[…] Some journalists get uncomfortable with the transparency they want from everyone else « Pursuing th… "Any journalist who uses email for interviews should understand that using email gives the source the ability to prove that you asked a manipulative or opinionated question (if you did) or that you used an answer out of context (if you did, and if the question might provide some context for the answer that your story didn’t). If you and the source later have a dispute about what was asked and answered and what you promised or didn’t about the direction of the story, you would be in a ridiculous position claiming that the source can’t use your emails. […]
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New Rule: An interview is a conversation, and if you want it to be more privileged than that, then work out an explicit agreement. All statements are on the record until explicitly (and before the act) declared otherwise, and either party is free to do whatever they wish with the result of that conversation unless agreed upon in advance.
The technical term for a “journalist” who feels otherwise is “asshole.”
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I’m not a journalist, however, I might play one on TV, so, thanks Dan!!!
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[…] Some journalists get uncomfortable with the transparency they want from everyone else […]
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Ah, the wonderful world of the internet, and Google Alerts. Nice to see Amy Gahran dig up this 4-year-old exchange we had on her blog.
The funny thing is, after four more years in the evolution of social media and journalism, I believe more firmly now in my response than ever. And it’s not an issue of arrogance or transparency. It’s simply an idea of integrity. If a reporter develops a story idea, works his/her sources, crafts questions, researches the issue, then spends hours writing a piece, there’s an intellectual investment and ownership to that idea, and the corresponding work that goes with it. A source contacted to comment on that idea, who then turns around and quickly posts something on their blog about it before that reporter completes his/her work, essentially robs that reporter of that intellectual ownership.
Perhaps Amy’s concession in the comment above regarding “negotiation” shows she’s not as far from my position now as she was four years ago. I never said a source couldn’t record the same conversation in agreement with the reporter upfront, then post it simultaneously when an article publishes. The point I made four years ago, and again today, is that there are ethical obligations for journalists to consider with their sources, but there are also ethical obligations for sources to consider with their journalists.
Sources aren’t required to participate in interviews. They can decline them. That was my point four years ago regarding the “rules of engagement”–if this kind of arrangement represents such a problem for an expert, they don’t have to participate. And if sources choose to participate, they do receive some value in return for their participation, despite what Amy may assert here. Their name appears in the paper and/or website, which may result in something as simple as a pat on the back in the grocery store line from a neighbor, an acknowledgment from colleagues that results in greater professional credibility, or, crazy as it may sound, a call from a book publisher who thinks their comment–and underlying expertise–makes for a dandy book idea.
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Matt,
Thanks for weighing in. You live in a very kind world if your sources observe some sort of unwritten code of ethics that respects the story as your sole property to be published at your leisure on your timetable. Journalists are a profession with written codes of ethics, university courses in ethics, professional seminars in ethics and textbooks and bloggers writing about ethics. Sources? Not a profession, no code, no sources or seminars, no textbooks or bloggers about the ethics of journalists’ sources. The closest you might come to that would be PR professionals, who do have professional ethics. But most journalists try to work around the PR folks and get to the direct decision-makers anyway. The ethics you suggest that sources should have are no more than general human decency. And any journalist who counts on sources to all behave decently is rather naïve.
In the world I live in, some sources are not pleased that I am working on the story at all. Some of them will get no benefit from a story. Others who get a benefit will not perceive that benefit the same way that I do. I have had sources call editors to try and kill or hold a story (usually without success, but alas, not always). I have had sources tip off the competition that I was working a story.
The whole premise of your comment reflects the journalist in control. That was never the case and it certainly isn’t today, when many sources are bloggers (many of them not journalists).
My advice to journalists wanting some favors from sources: Negotiate them in advance, and even then, don’t be surprised if someone doesn’t respect the agreement.
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Matt, my response above was copied directly from my response to you on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits 4 years ago, that’s not a new addition.
And no, I don’t agree with you. Your statement implied that only the reporter gets to decide how an interview conversation gets used — and that absent specific negotiation, ownership of the material should be assumed to be the sole domain of the reporter.
I said — and am still saying: NOT.
Rather, if either party wishes to put constraints on how either side of an on-the-record interview gets used, that needs to be negotiated up front. A more realistic default assumption should be that you’re both on the record and can use the material, unless otherwise agreed by both parties.
– Amy Gahran
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[…] Some journalists get uncomfortable with the transparency they want from everyone else […]
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[…] already blogged twice about the Times report, and I’ve blogged multiple times about the importance of transparency. So I won’t belabor the point here. But I’ll invite O’Leary (or […]
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