Reinventing the Media Interview
Exhibit A: Mark Cuban. Mark doesn't do media interviews by phone anymore (if he ever did). He only does them by email so he has a complete record of the conversation and can correct misgivings on his blog. In this situation, Mark (the source) publishes the full text of a specific media interview to give everyone a panoramic view of the reporter and source's perspectives.
Exhibit B: Dave Winer. Dave, who invented blogging and RSS, takes a more subtle approach. He describes today how he answers interview questions on his blog without saying who the reporter is and exactly what questions were asked. He "create(s) a public record, something that can be useful to anyone." Part of his rationale, like Cuban's, is to avoid being quoted selectively and out of context.
This is just the beginning. There's a lot of room to innovate here. So many of the good quotes, anecdotes and news nuggets never see the light of day because they're left on the cutting room floor. Given that a lot of reporters have blogs, I am wondering if we can begin to open this entire process up.
For instance, what if reporters posted their questions out in the 'sphere and allowed prospective sources to respond either in comments or by linking to/trackbacking the post. This would give the reporter potentially infinite sound bites and anecdotes to choose from. Even better, they could let us vote for the best quotes as they come in. Some journalists are already using their blogs to find interview sources, but no one I am aware of is taking it to this next step.
Second, maybe there should be a universal Technorati tag that bloggers use to identify when they are publishing information specifically in response to reporters. This could be coupled with the above idea. For example, the formediainterviews tag right now is empty. This would make it easier for us to cull through all of the content bloggers are publishing in response to media requests via an RSS feed.
Finally, there could be a ping pong style approach where journalists blog questions to specific sources who blog. Then the source responds by linking to/trackbacking the post and then the process repeats itself over and over until the interview is over. Tedious? Sure. However, it would certainly generate rich dialogue not just in these blogs but overall.
Some of these may techniques might not work well in the real world. However, what is certain is that there is a lot of room to reinvent the media interview to make them more transparent and to give everyone access to all of the material that doesn't make it into print.
