Talk to me, talk to my blog
: OJR’s Mark Glaser is pissed. Various dastardly interview subjects (meaning me, I think) have taken to posting their answers to questions in email interviews on their own weblogs before Glaser can get his story published.
I understand his upset at being scooped by his own interview subjects (and I apologized when I did it, though what I used didn’t end up in the story anyway).
But I told him that I think the solution is simple: Ask the subject not to post the quotes until after the piece appears.
Otherwise, I do not believe that the reporter has any more right to the contents of such an exchange than the reporter. Glaser says the questions come in “private email.” Again, I disagree: It’s a conversation whose entire intent is quite public, not private, that happens to occur in email and if anyone has greater right to it, it is perhaps the interview subject for it is his or her opinions that are being sought and used.
Reporters will have to get accustomed to bloggers doing this for bloggers like to be transparent and they like to be timely; if they are thinking it, they will blog it.
Talk to me, talk to my blog.
If Glaser had asked me not to quote myself, I would have respected that — though I still would have used the thoughts because I had those thoughts anyway and was writing something similar already.
And all of this is terribly inside baseball and not terribly interesting but I’m adding to the word count on the subject because so many others are — see Sheila Lennon, Adrian Holovaty, Jonathan Dube, and, at length, JD Lasica.
