Dear journalists (a rant),
Please realize that, even if you fancy yourselves as "technical reporters", you are not sufficiently competent in the technical matters you're writing about.
I don't mean to disparage you - your competency lies elsewhere. You know how to sniff newsworthy stuff, you know how to grab your readers' interest, and you know how to present the story in a way that they (who are even less technically competent than you) would understand.
But you are NOT technical experts. After all, this is why you talk to experts, right? If you were experts yourselves, you would be writing papers - not newspaper articles. And, conversely, if we, the experts, were competent in matters of journalism, we would be writing newspaper articles instead.
Anyway, my point is, because of your lack of expertise, you are quite likely to misunderstand what we're telling you. And if you write wrong stuff in your publication, you're going to mislead thousands of people.
So, I have a simple request - before publishing your story, have the experts you talked to double-check your writing. At the very least, ask them to review the quotes that you're going to attribute to them.
Case in point.
I was recently interviewed by a journalist from the Bulgarian magazine "Capital" about the early days of computing in Bulgaria. He was especially interested in my field of expertise - the Bulgarian computer viruses.
The article is much more general than this, of course - only about 1/4th of it is about computer viruses. It has 3 quotes of stuff that I've said.
Now, you see, because I have a 90-year old mother to care for at home and because there is still a pandemic going on, I am isolating myself at home as much as possible. I refused to meet the journalist personally.
We conducted the interview over Skype. He recorded the whole 1 hour of it. Every single word of mine. Should be easy to pick quotes correctly, right?
Wrong. Every single one of the 3 quotes contained a word that I had NOT said (different word each time). Adding this word significantly changed the meaning of what I had said - and it is something he had completely dreamed up either due to a misunderstanding, or because he thought it would make what I had said "more readable".
Thankfully, he showed professionalism by letting me review the quotes before publication - so the errors were corrected in time. But not many journalists do this.
Please, be like this guy and not like them, if you want us, the experts, to respect you and to talk to you again. Because if you print some stuff claiming that I've said some nonsense that I haven't, you're making me look like a fool and making sure that I won't be talking to you ever again.
@bontchev this is such an important message and it's bringing up a lot of trends in journalism that I've been watching grow over the last couple of decades, and that I believe have contributed so strongly to the state of things around the world where nobody knows which conflicting report to trust.
And the problem is I know people associated with professional journalism who actually actively prefer the practices that you are calling out here.
Unfortunately it's not just a question of asking them to do better because, at least the ones I talk to and the experience I have watching journalism, they actually think they are doing better with this approach.
It's not good for society, and I honestly don't know what would have to happen to have them change course.
@volkris Yeah. In fact, one journalist even lectured me once that letting the interviewed subject review the article before publication was "bad practice" because, you see, "it would let the interviewee influence the writing".
Dude, you talked to me. I had every opportunity to influence you during the interview. I told what I thought you should hear.
Besides, I am not asking you to write what I want. I am only asking you to give me the opportunity to spot the nonsense in what you have written and to correct it. If you don't want to take that opportunity - go ahead and publish your nonsense; I'm not going to stop you. But at least let's make sure that it is the result of your decision and not the result of your ignorance.