I occasionally get texts from journalists asking to interview me about things around the aspiring rationalist scene. A few notes on my thinking and protocols for this:
I generally think it is pro-social to share information with serious journalists on topics of clear public interest.
By-default I speak with them only if their work seems relatively high-integrity. I like journalists whose writing is (a) factually accurate, (b) boring, and (c) do not feel to me to have an undercurrent of hatred for their subjects.
By default I speak with them off-the-record, and then offer to send them write-ups of the things I said that they want to quote. This has gone quite well. I’ve felt comfortable speaking in my usual fashion without worrying about nailing each and every phrasing. Then I ask what they’re interested in quoting, and I send them (typically a 1-2 page) google doc on those topics (largely re-stating what I already said to them, and making some improvements / additions). Then they tell me which quotes they want to use (typically cutting many sentences or paragraphs half-way). Then I make one or two slight edits and give them explicit permission to quote. I think this has gone quite well and they’ve felt my quotes were substantive and improvements.
For the New York Times, I am currently trying out the policy of “I am happy to chat off-the-record. I will also offer quotes by my usual protocol, but I will only give them conditional on you including a mention that I disapprove of the NYT’s de-anonymization policies (which I bring up due to your reckless and negligent behavior that upturned the life of a beloved member of my community).” I am about to try this for the first time, and I expect they will thus not want to use my quotes, and that’s fine by me.
Claude says its a gray area when I ask, since this isn’t asking for the journalist to make a general change to the story or present Ben or the subject in a particular light.
Update from chatting with him: he said he was a just freelancer doing a year exclusively with NYT, and he wasn’t in a position to write on behalf of the NYT on the issue (e.g. around their deanonymization policies). This wasn’t satisfying to me, and so I will keep to being off-the-record.
I occasionally get texts from journalists asking to interview me about things around the aspiring rationalist scene. A few notes on my thinking and protocols for this:
I generally think it is pro-social to share information with serious journalists on topics of clear public interest.
By-default I speak with them only if their work seems relatively high-integrity. I like journalists whose writing is (a) factually accurate, (b) boring, and (c) do not feel to me to have an undercurrent of hatred for their subjects.
By default I speak with them off-the-record, and then offer to send them write-ups of the things I said that they want to quote. This has gone quite well. I’ve felt comfortable speaking in my usual fashion without worrying about nailing each and every phrasing. Then I ask what they’re interested in quoting, and I send them (typically a 1-2 page) google doc on those topics (largely re-stating what I already said to them, and making some improvements / additions). Then they tell me which quotes they want to use (typically cutting many sentences or paragraphs half-way). Then I make one or two slight edits and give them explicit permission to quote. I think this has gone quite well and they’ve felt my quotes were substantive and improvements.
For the New York Times, I am currently trying out the policy of “I am happy to chat off-the-record. I will also offer quotes by my usual protocol, but I will only give them conditional on you including a mention that I disapprove of the NYT’s de-anonymization policies (which I bring up due to your reckless and negligent behavior that upturned the life of a beloved member of my community).” I am about to try this for the first time, and I expect they will thus not want to use my quotes, and that’s fine by me.
The quoting policy seems very good and clever :)
Yep, my impression is that it violates the journalist code to negotiate with sources for better access if you write specific things about them.
Claude says its a gray area when I ask, since this isn’t asking for the journalist to make a general change to the story or present Ben or the subject in a particular light.
Update from chatting with him: he said he was a just freelancer doing a year exclusively with NYT, and he wasn’t in a position to write on behalf of the NYT on the issue (e.g. around their deanonymization policies). This wasn’t satisfying to me, and so I will keep to being off-the-record.