Scooped by a Source

From left: Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, and Jeff Jarvis are among those bloggers whose sites could play host to a journalists' interview, pre-publication.

All Kate Kaye wanted were a couple of quotes. Back in April, the news editor of the interactive marketing news site ClickZ spotted the news that Weblogs Inc., the blog network that Calacanis had started and sold to AOL, were introducing regionally themed sites. Seeing as how the news fit neatly into a story package Kaye happened to be working on, she dropped Calacanis a line. Did he have time for a quick interview? Sure, he replied, but only via email. I do all my interviews via email these days, he told her, to prevent myself from being misquoted. With misgivings, Kaye fired off a volley of questions that Calacanis promptly answered. After a few rounds of back-and-forth follow-ups, Kaye was satisfied she had enough for her story. She thanked him and promptly forgot about it, at least until her executive editor pointed her to Calacanis' personal blog a week later. To Kaye's horror, he had posted their exchange, email headers and all, on his personal blog, as Calacanis is wont to do.

Furious, Kaye emailed him and demanded he take the interview down immediately, "especially considering you posted it without my permission and before my story was published," she recalls writing to him. Calacanis apologized, offering the explanation that he had thought she was a regular reader of his blog. If she was, she would have been aware that he posts almost all of his interviews not long after conducting them (although he typically omits the names and addresses, which in her case he had mistakenly included in his cut-and-paste and subsequently removed). Kaye accepted his apology, but the interview had been rendered worthless as far as she was concerned (though she ultimately included it): She had been scooped by her own source.

"Anybody owns his or her own words," she says today. "But it's been this way for a very long time that the reporter conducting the interview has the first stab for using the information, and beyond that, let's talk. The playing field has completely changed, and I think that because these things aren't understood, if you're going to turn the table on someone, you might want to give the reporter a heads-up and offer them the opportunity to ask you to wait." .

Actually, Calacanis did just that when I interviewed him recently (via email, of course) about his practice of publishing his interviews. He, too, asserted that he owned his own words, and possessed the right to publish them whenever he liked, and that he encouraged others bloggers to do the same. "Of course," he wrote, "it keeps journalists from quoting you out of context and you get content for your blog. My blog exists so I can communicate with my team, my family, my friends, and associates. Why should I have to type these things up twice?!?!" But he had recently started asking reporters like myself beforehand if we minded. In my case, I replied, I did.

Kaye's feelings of betrayal and Calacanis' view that his interviews are a quick-and-easy source of personal content comprise just one example of the latest wrinkle in the changing power dynamics between the working press and self-publishers, i.e. the MSM and the bloggers. As more and more subjects and sources for stories become publishers in their own right, the temptation to pre-emptively publish spin (or counter-spin) increases. Is that fair to the journalist who came calling, and is it reneging on the unspoken agreement that the source will lend his or her words in return for ambiguously positive exposure? What are the ethics of these situations? "It's a new situation and there are no ethics yet," counters Jay Rosen, a blogger himself and a professor of journalism at New York University. "It's coming up because there is a shift in power. Sources have more power than they used to because they can publish too. The old rules -- which meant that I could interview you for 30 minutes and cherry-pick two sentences -- weren't exactly fair to the people interviewed."

Calacanis's seemingly innocuous habit of posting interviews as a simple matter of course before the articles they're featured in are published is a new twist on the more common practice of attempting to punish or embarrass journalists by posting email exchanges after a story appears, usually one that didn't go the subject's way. The New York Times has repeatedly been battered by leading bloggers like Mark Cuban (Blogmaverick) and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), and even the bloggers at General Motors, who demonstrated how the sausage of a letter to the editor gets made after Thomas Friedman compared the automaker and its gas-guzzling Hummers to a crack dealer.

Before that, Mark Cuban posted his exchange with M&A reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin to illustrate how the tone and content of Sorkin's story differed substantially from his lines of questioning (and how he ultimately ignored Cuban's reponses). The controversial CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, has repeatedly posted interviews with reporters on his site and elsewhere in his attempts to discredit and expose what he believes is a conspiracy against the stock price of his company. In one strange exchange, Byrne attacked Cuban (who is shorting Overstock.com stock) on Bloomberg TV, prompting a Bloomberg News reporter to ask Cuban for comment, who obliged the reporter and his own readers by posting his rebuke on Blogmaverick.

If this is all starting to seems like yet another example of blogger infighting that's been inflated into a referendum on the way we live now, then consider the dilemma that faced the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record last summer, after one of the paper's reporters called city councilman Tom Phillips about the news that Wal-Mart was buying land on the east side of town. After giving a quote to the reporter, who was under the impression that his call was the first Phillips had heard about the sale, Phillips broke the news on his personal blog, thus depriving the News & Record of the scoop (which declared it an exclusive, anyway). Was Phillips within his rights, or was it dirty pool?

"The last thing a newspaper journalist should be doing is telling people they can't break the news on their own," said News & Record editor John Robinson, who has almost single-handedly transformed his paper into a confederation of hard-working bloggers. "If, as in this case, a city council member wants to break news based on information we've given to him, he can do that. That's just part of the new way of the world. But if every interview subject we had started posting conversations, then we'd have to reconsider."

Yes, we all would. The ability to procure interviews, conduct them professionally, and extract insights from the resulting conversations is commonly perceived as a big part of the value we add as journalists to any news story that involves more than rewriting a press release or regurgitating the minutes from a city council meeting. One school of thought argues that exclusivity never added very much value anyway, or at least it pales in comparison to the value to be gained from reader participation and transparency.

"I think you're assuming that there is any value left in the scoop," wrote Jeff Jarvis, blogger and citizen journalism advocate, in an email. "There isn't. You can't control the biorhythms of news anymore. The world doesn't much care who reported what first. Bylines matter to writers, not readers."

They matter to editors, too. And so do exclusive quotes. While I agreed with Jeff that the scoop-for-scoop's sake means increasingly little (except in matters of national security and other instances of life-or-death), his stance won't convince editors that the journalists who borrow the words of a Mark Cuban, or Jason Calacanis (or Jarvis, for that matter) from the logorrhea of their blogs is anything other than lazy. "Ah, but that is what has to change: the editors' heads," the journalism school professor replied. "They have to discover what their real value is, and it is not being first with quoted blather. It is being the smartest, or most useful, or most reliable."

That may be true, but they won't change their minds overnight. And, speaking as a reporter who formerly trafficked in deeply off-the-record information on a daily basis, the plate-glass transparency of a world in which every interviewee announces your phone call the second after you hang up promises to play havoc with how stories and even publications are made on a daily basis. There are competitive issues that go beyond just scoops -- two years ago at BloggerCon, for example, Calacanis offhandedly mentioned that anyone could learn the upcoming story lineup of Wiredwith the right combination of Technorati keywords. "Everyone who gets a call blogs about it immediately," he chuckled at the time. Considering I was racing to finish a profile of Nick Denton at the time for Business 2.0-- just a month ahead of Wired's own -- I was terrified that my own set of sources and lines of questioning would leak onto the blogosphere.

The News & Record's Robinson raises a related point that "there are a lot of ways to go about getting information, and a reporter may ask the same question eight different ways to eight different people, with none of the style of their questioning coming through in the story they write." (Witness the cordial tone of the Andrew Sorkin's email exchange with Mark Cuban compared to his published story.) So, the idea of sources publishing their interviews and spinning accordingly -- without knowing what part they play in the larger story -- promises to complicate their relationship even further, a headache that working stiffs don't need.

So let's consider the issue tactically, then. Whose job is it to broach the issue and obtain the permission to publish (or withhold) from the other? ClickZ's Kate Kaye argues that Calacanis, in her case, violated a "gentleman's agreement" that granted her, as the journalist, first use of the quotes. "The accepted contract was broken," she says, diminishing Calcanis' long-term value to her as a source. "I'm going to think twice about calling him again. It's a matter of respect and consideration, and just a good business practice."

I respectfully disagree, although the bloggers interviewed for this story were less restrained when echoing that opinion. "Journalists should not for a second presume that the public shares journalists' self-important rules about letting them report our conversations first," Jarvis wrote, adding, "When a reporter calls a source, why should we think that the source's thoughts become the reporter's property?"

"I don't ever cede anything," Mark Cuban chimed in via email. "You either know I have a blog when you interview me, or you are a dumbass. If you ask me not to report our exchange on my blog, which has been done, then I decide if I want that protection or not."

Cuban's "no surrender" position aside, everyone else interviewed for this story was amenable to the idea that self-publishing rights, like on- or off-the-record attribution, is something that must be negotiated beforehand. "If someone wants me to hold back the interview until their story comes out I'll do that," Calacanis wrote. "I understand the value of information issue."

Perhaps the rules of thumb, then, should be as follows:

1) If the person has a blog, read it. (Especially if you're soliciting their opinions because they're bloggers.) Their penchant for posting interviews online may become readily apparent.

2) Set publications ground rules just as you would set attribution ones with a reluctant source. For this story, for example, I asked Calacanis to withhold from publishing until the day it appeared. (You can see for yourself whether I misquoted him or not here.) For the others, I set no ground rules at all, thinking that Jarvis, Rosen, et. al would find better things to blog about. (Sadly, I was right.)

3) And then trust them, just as any interview subject has to trust you not to make fools of them with selective quoting.

Not that it'll wind up making much difference in the end. "You can resist all you want," warns Robinson, "you can put up all these agreements with sources and so on, but the changing marketplace is such that it's like trying to use a rope to keep the ocean from coming in."

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer and regular contributor to mediabistro.com.