I finally made good on a promise to Fagistani president Joshua Gibson to contribute a piece to his blog. Gibson's foul-mouthed and always insightful commentary has been on my short list of must-reads since I discovered his blog a year ago, and he has contributed here more than once. You can read my piece, which concerns an egregious bit of journalistic mumbo-jumbo on display at the Huffington Post, here.
Do you have guidelines that govern how you edit interviews? What are they?
I have a lot of personal rules when it comes how I edit interviews, but I believe they are just that - personal. There is far less consensus on the topic of interview editing than on some areas of reporting, and in a litigious age in which reporters are often playing defense, the ethics of the many editing techniques applied to interview material are one of those things journalists don't much like to talk about. So I thought it would be interesting to outline some practices I employ which some journalists might take issue with, and others I avoid that some journalists feel are acceptable.
I wrote yesterday about how great it was using Google Talk to conduct an interview for this blog. The chat client created its own transcript and the format had the immediacy of a telephone interview and the ease of an email interview, and with just a little coordination can be the best way for a busy blogger to get a good feature interview. That got me thinking about publishing the transcript of our interview so readers could see how different an interview transcript can be from a finished interview. I believe that a lot of editing - some of it quite aggressive - is often necessary to create interviews that meet the basic criteria for good stories in other forms. But I also think that these methods should be fairly transparent, so that readers are aware of the ways in which what they see on paper may differ from what occurred.
Reporters may or may not have covered these finer points of interviewing ethics in journalism school, but there is no gold standard on the topic. The best we can really hope for is that reporters apply consistent standards that are in line with broader journalism ethics and err on the side of preserving their subjects' autonomous ability to speak for themselves.
Here are a few things I do with my interviews:
Below is the edited interview I'd like to post. I have reordered a few things (you can see what by comparing with your chat transcript), combined some question/answer segments to make our blocks of speaking longer and correct any delayed responses, and done grammar edits throughout. I also rephrased a couple of my questions where I saw that there were better words I could use. You are welcome to request edits to your own speech, but try to do it with a light hand - a conversational tone is really important for a Q&A interview. Please let me know of any changes you'd like to make in the next few days.Click here to read the full transcript.
Another thing:
I have been thinking about how well the chat format worked for our interview and had a thought. I have done hundreds of interviews - phone, email, and live - and always edit them in this way, but have often thought that readers would be interested to see how an interview transcript translates into a finished interview. Since obfuscation is a necessary theme of your Languages of War, and since we conducted our interview in a format people don't use much yet (a chat client) I thought it might be interesting to offer the original transcript of our conversation for readers who would like to see how an interview is edited and how a chat interview constructs itself. Granted, not everyone would be interested in this, but it isn't something I've seen done before and I think it would be interesting to some, and I would roll it up in a conversation about the benefits of using Gmail chat for interviewing.
As an experiment in openness, how would you feel about this? We might each have said a thing or two we would not have phrased in exactly that way if we had planned from the start on publishing a straight transcript (the interview would have been pretty bad if we had!) but unless you feel like there's something very compromising to you in it, I'd like to do it.
Rebecca Whipple and I conducted our "Languages of War" interview on September 21 at about 5 a.m. CST, which is about noon in Paris. It's the first interview I have ever conducted via the Gmail-embedded Google Talk client. I was inspired to try because of the limitations of both phone and email interviews, and wanted to see how using a chat client like Google Talk measured up against each of these formats.
Google Talk: The Blog Interviewer's New Best Friend
Telephone interviews are far too difficult, both logistically and in terms of available time, for part-time bloggers to conduct on a regular basis. The alternative, the email interview, generally feels less spontaneous and open-ended than a feature interview should be; sending list of questions means there is no conversational flow and no chance for shared information to shape the dialogue. But this has been the standard for interviewers who are short on time. It takes far less time to work an email interview into a final form, whereas telephone interview transcription can take a long time, time most bloggers don't have if they want to keep up with the blogosphere's running conversation.
The crux of the matter is that a good interviewer responds to their subject in a relational, non-scripted way. Many of us learn this the hard way; as a young A&E reporter in college I once interviewed Kurt Vonnegut with a set of tortured lit-crit "questions" and then impersonated a piece of petrified wood while he spend 45 minutes telling stories I'd already read in multiple interviews or even in Palm Sunday. He didn't follow my script, and when he ventured into well-worn territory, I lacked the skills to drag him back to new ground. An email interview simply forces an interview subject to submit to a bad interview, and there's little either party can do about it.
The chat client built into Gmail creates its own transcripts and stores them as emails. That means that with a little grep cleanup in a text-editing program (find/replace should work almost as well) I was beginning the real work of editing my artist interview within minutes. For many bloggers, this kind of time savings can make the difference between having the time to interview your most interesting subjects and not doing interviews at all.
Google Talk For Newsrooms?
When news reporters confront the heavy time requirements of features interviewing, their solution is to do a phone interview and jot down fairly detailed notes on their reporting pad, reconstruct their quotes later, and (if necessary) run them by the interview subject over the phone to make sure they haven't screwed anything up. This keeps them from having to do a lot of transcription, especially now, when newspaper transcription pools are a luxury of a bygone age. But the interview subject's voice is stripped out in this economizing. This doesn't matter in news reporting, but for a feature or in-depth interview or profile it can be a killer.
Google Talk bridges the gap between the convenience of an email interview and the natural, conversational style of a good phone interview. I find taped phone interviews to be as good as in-person interviews for Q&A formatted material (profiles really benefit from in-person interaction, which give the writer much to observe and record), but I'd recommend chatting as superior even to phone interviewing because all you lose is the tone of voice behind speech, and I think this is actually a good thing to lose. In conversation, variations in tone communicate a lot. The result is that printed quotes may distort a subject's view simply because that conversational data that was available to the interview has not made it onto the page.
Interestingly, the chat format preserves the exact conversation for both parties, which represents a shift in power from the publisher towards the subject - a shift that would be even more profoundly felt in a newsroom, where adversarial interviewing occurs every day, and thus creates an environment in which things are sometimes misinterpreted, misreported or denied, especially when the subject refuses to be recorded for the interview (a sure sign that they wish to reserve the right to deny later what they have said to the reporter). While this power shift does come at some cost to the publisher, it is one few could argue against, as it preserves, above all, the integrity of the interview. It protects readers, editors, and sources from bad reporting, and protects publications from fraudulent lawsuits. The only catch is that the transcript is web-generated, and in extreme cases reporters might find Google (or whatever transcript-enabled chat client they used) turning over their transcript to the government. If chat reporting became a dominant form of interviewing for publication, as I believe it should, this fact could alter the landscape of First Amendment protection for journalists as it is currently interpreted by the publishing community.
How Interviews Are Edited For Publication
Tomorrow I will post about the kinds of changes interviewers make to feature interviews which average readers may not know about, and the questions reporters face when editing interviews into a lively format with a good flow. I will also post a transcript of the raw interview I conducted with Rebecca Whipple, which interested readers can compare with the published Q&A. This will offer some examples of the kinds of changes and edits that I consider to be legitimate but which do "misrepresent," in the narrowest sense, the original conversation.
Reuters has just opened a news bureau in Second Life, with a full-time bureau chief and a news reading/viewing room in-world. Early stories include an overview of the virtual world's economy and a profile of SL's biggest lender, which charges interest rates of 40%. You can read a New York Times interview with bureau chief Adam Pasick and others here, one with Wagner James Au (the original SL reporter) here, or check out the agency's nice news hub here.
It sounds as though the Reuters outpost will be focusing on business stories, which isn't at all what I find interesting about the virtual world, but it's a start, and will probably have a significant impact on the economic development in Second Life. [Via]
