What to Know About Talking With a Journalist

Our journalists are here to listen and learn from you. Here are some tips that may help you prepare for an interview:

Our journalists will explain what their stories are about and their reporting processes.

You deserve to know what our stories aim to accomplish and how we’ll do that.

We’ll also be transparent if we don’t yet have a concrete idea of the story’s angle or know who else we’ll be speaking with (which is often the case early on in our reporting). And we’ll do our best to follow up with you if our story angle changes.

You can say no.

You do not have to talk to us unless you want to. And you can decline to respond to certain questions. Our journalists may still write that you declined to talk to us or declined to answer a certain question, but you can weigh whether you want to say something or let us say in our story that you declined comment.

Tell us what you want us to know—and be honest.

You have full control over what you say. Before the interview, it can help to reflect on the main points you want to tell us. We’ll work hard to accurately portray what you say and provide context for your remarks in our articles.

During the interview, you should assume that everything you tell a journalist may appear in the final article, unless you and the journalist both agree otherwise.

If you and the journalist both agree that something is “off the record,” that means the journalist will not use that information in the article. Information shared while off the record strictly remains between the journalist and the source. “On background” means that the journalist can use the information in the article but without attributing it to a specific individual.

We sometimes ask for more information than we’ll include in the final article.

A major part of our job is to ensure we are conveying facts accurately. Sometimes we’ll ask you questions so we can fact check information or ensure that we’re understanding a concept correctly and within context. It’s also possible we may not use anything from your interview at all. When that happens, we’ll do our best to give you a heads up. No matter what, we always appreciate your time and a chance to get to know you.

You can record the interview, too.

Our journalists will most likely be recording the interview to ensure accuracy and context, but you can also take your own recording, so you have a record of what you said. This can also help you correct any misquoting.

We do not pay sources to speak with us for articles, and you do not need to pay us to be interviewed.

This is because anyone who is paid to talk with us could be swayed to bend the truth.

Our preference is to include your first and last name in our articles.

Readers deserve to know who we’re getting our information from, so we rarely grant partial or full anonymity. You can read about our anonymous sources policy here.

You won’t be able to see a copy of the full final story before it’s published.

We don’t let anyone outside our journalism team preview stories. It’s part of our ethics and helps us maintain our credibility.

Journalists’ jobs are to report facts accurately and independently. Imagine if we were reporting on a well-known public official accused of corruption. You wouldn’t want that official to review and edit the story before publication, so it makes them look better.

Our duty is to the public, not any specific source or special interest. The decisions about what to include in our articles and how to include them are always made with the public’s interest in mind. Per our fairness policy, we will provide such sources a chance to respond to our interview request and to any accusations.

You are welcome to ask our journalists to double-check facts or quotes with you.

Keep in mind that articles live online in perpetuity once they’re published.

We will rarely make changes to an article after it’s published. However, we will promptly issue corrections if we get something wrong.

We encourage you to think carefully about whether you do want to talk with one of our journalists if you are in a position where speaking with a journalist may cause harm to you (such as get you in trouble with a current or future employer or landlord).

We respect that people living with trauma have special circumstances.

So some of our typical policies will not apply. We want to ensure trauma survivors’ continued consent in our journalism, so we will allow sources experiencing trauma to read the full text of stories they appear in before publication and remove information they shared that they no longer want included. We adhere to the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma’s trauma-informed practices.

We welcome feedback.

We’re human and always strive to do better both professionally and personally. Journalists often only hear feedback from their editors before their story runs, but we’d love to hear what you think before, during and after our interactions with you. And feel free to tell us who else you think we should talk with and what else we should focus on for our article(s).

This guide was inspired by those of KPCC/LAist, MLK50, Borderless Magazine, AP and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics’ guide to less extractive reporting.

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