And, it about time. Journalism as currently practiced is a danger to the Republic. I for one am very glad technology has given the rest of us some leverage against the more radical and dishonest elements in it.

As a reporter I also always favored actually speaking to someone. Interviews are conversations, and email is not a good conversation medium.

It gets easier every day to capture audio and now you can upload a podcast in no time flat. End of problem. Moving on.

That’s so true. Everybody spins and plays to their own biases. So true that’s it’s true of every reporter and every blogger as well. Thus, I think .your following conclusion is false:

For a blogger, behaving that way would be deadly. Nobody would want to read a blog written that way.

Nothing has ever been written that lacks spin or biases (can you name even ONE counterexample?). People must like reading spin and bias, or there’d be no print industry, much less blogger that people pay attention to.

Every newspaper has a bias toward the idea that we should read newspapers because worrying things are always going on, and every day in every newspaper sees at least a few stories hyped to seem more worrying or interesting than the truth would be.

There have been some corporate blogs that have gone nowhere, but others have succeeded brilliantly (Microsoft, Sun). You have to make your propaganda interesting, I guess.

Verba volant, scripta manent…

For those who do not know latin:
The words fly, the written things stay…

So?

The fact is that the email interview was a godsend. In fact, it got so I would fudge and say something like: “I’d love to talk, and maybe we can when the craziness dies down, but for now let me answer your questions via email.”

And then what happened? We, the senior management team, would sit down, strategize, and think of the most nuanced prose we could that would answer the reporters question yet fudge any issues we wanted to be less than forthcoming about. And we were good. I was very good. But not so good that I could have finessed the probing questions of a good reporter talking with me in person.

Example: A major newspaper wanted a comment on the passing of a high-profile muckety-muck. We had mixed feelings about said muckety-muck, but were not anxious for those mixed feelings to be public knowledge. The result? An email “interview.” In fact, any reporter either speaking with me on the phone or in person would have quickly sensed my ambivalence.

When the subject is a flack with an agenda to promote, beware of email! They really aren’t interviews at all, but a statement prepared by a flack embedded in the veneer of an interview.

Email interviews should really be referred to as email “interviews.”

But a lot of people, business leaders and politicians especially, get where they are with the help of rigid message control. They equivocate and prevaricate and plan every word of every prepared public statement with the help of a committee of spin doctors. A personal interview, whether it’s face-to-face or on the phone, might be the only chance a reporter gets to knock such a person off his or her message track, usually by asking an unexpected question or pressing for ever-more detail until the subject has to speak off the top of his or her head. With an e-mail interview, the interview subject has all the time in the world to come up with a processed response to any question the writer comes up with. They’d use the e-mail format to make sure they didn’t reveal a single thing they didn’t want to reveal.

For a blogger, behaving that way would be deadly. Nobody would want to read a blog written that way. Other bloggers would tear such a writer apart. Where the audience is concerned, I don’t think everyone has the same intuitive skepticism and yearning to do further research that a conscientious blogger does. A blogger is a lot harder to B.S. than the typical person on the street.

It’s true that a lot of bloggers seem to be, in a way, more themselves when they write than when they talk, anyway. They’re instinctively open and direct. For them, and in a handful of other cases, e-mail interviews might well make sense.

In my professional-journalist job just now, I’m waiting for an e-mail answer to a complex policy question from a reasonably prominent Canadian political leader. Luckily I’m not in a hurry to get this information, and I’m just after a factual clarification about her views on something.

I’m also pretty confident that she’s the kind of person who’ll have written the response herself and that she’ll sound like a human being rather than a message-machine. I’m very sure that she’s in a minority among people in her line of work.

Eventually, maybe the Internet will make that approach to communication mandatory and the pols created by committees will die out, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Till we are, I think e-mail interviews will do an awful lot more to serve interview subjects who have something to hide than to serve readers who have a right to know what that something is.

(Incidentally, do you think making available an audio recording of a “live” interview would be transparent enough?)

I actually would like to see at least full transcripts of interviews run with stories, if not the actual audio.

The problem with e-mail interviews is the lack of an actual conversation. Often the best stories from interviews evolve from follow-ups, threads that evolve from answers to the original, scripted questions.

In e-mail that spontanaity and depth is problematic.

Moreover, journalists have powerful incentives to get interviews right. Burned sources rarely consent to be interviewed again. Every editor I have known takes complaints from unhappy sources very seriously. Reporters who consistently misquote generally wind up in another line of work.

I have interviewed a few thousand people over the years, and every single one of the best interviews took place in person. There simply is no substitute if you want to do quality work.