There’s an interesting dustup in the journalism world about the Q&A column in the Sunday New York Times magazine. A New York Press story about these interviews by Deborah Solomon included complaints from two of her subjects — one of them This American Life’s Ira Glass, himself no interviewing naif — that she misrepresented them and inserted questions in her own voice that she hadn’t actually asked them. Then on Sunday Times “public editor” Clark Hoyt devoted a whole column to the matter.
It always seemed hugely obvious to me that Solomon’s terse, one-page interviews were boiled-down and heavily edited. But I look at these things as an editor with some experience. What this controversy really reveals is the gulf between the reverence most newspaper reporters have for quotation marks and the relatively cavalier stance assumed by many magazine writers and editors. (Yes, of course these are gross generalizations, and the world has plenty of careless newspaper reporters and careful magazine journalists. But the patterns do exist, in my experience.) So it’s no wonder that the flashpoint for confusion here should be in the weekly magazine published by a daily newspaper. Times mag editor Gerald Marzorati told Hoyt, “This is an entertainment, not a newsmaker interview on ‘Meet the Press.'” But it’s also part of the New York Times, and that still carries a set of expectations about the reliability of everything between quote marks.
I got my start in journalism in newspapering, and what I learned was that anything between direct quotation marks ought to be a verbatim quote from your subject. If you took words out, you marked it with an ellipsis. If you were paraphrasing or otherwise changing words, you had to take the quote marks off — you then had an indirect quote.
When I started freelancing and experiencing the wide variety of editing standards at different publications I was appalled to discover that some significant portion of my editors were “fixing up” quotes in various ways. When I complained, they dismissed my objections. It seemed that they believed we had license to improve the statements of the subject for the benefit of the reader.
As with so many aspects of journalism, the rules here vary far more than just from publication to publication: there’s essentially a different set of rules for each journalist you meet.
Over the course of my career I came to the following set of practices: In news coverage of any kind, I stick to the verbatim quotation-mark reverence of my training. In my book, anything between quote marks represented words somebody said. In lengthy Q&A interviews where I’ve taped an interview, and where the purpose of the piece is to talk with a writer or artist about his or her work, I will take the liberty of tightening rambling answers and sharpening both questions and answers. I’ve done a lot of these and never heard an objection. If you’re helping interviewees explain their work or expose their ideas, they’re usually grateful for you to do a little editing, as long as it doesn’t alter the substance of their statements. But if you’re challenging them, it’s best to stick to the tape.
It looks like Solomon got into trouble because she frequently adopts a confrontational stance. That’s part of the appeal of her column, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But if you’re practicing “gotcha” journalism you can’t take liberties with the transcript. It’s inevitable that you’ll get called on it. And in today’s media environment, you’ll get called fast.
[tags]deborah solomon, new york times, quotations, journalism[/tags]
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