Kevin Drum: I have a different idea: publish the entire transcript of the interview on the web.

Amen!

Actually, newspapers are in the business of making money for their owners. Informing people is simply a feature that attracts readers -- who are then "sold" to the advertisers, which generates the revenue.

Readers, for the most part, are an expense. Subscription revenue rarely covers the expenses of the circulation department, let alone all the other departments involved in producing a newspaper.

(Most people who point to lower circulation levels at newspapers as a sign that newspapers are failiing don't seem to realize that many newspapers today want lower circulation. It is simply too expensive to get those last couple thousands readers. Better to let them go away. This saves promotion money, distribution costs, and production costs.)

Advertisers are the target, readers are simply needed to attract the advertisers.

As a result, informing readers of anything is priority number 100 in the long list of priorities. Generating profits is #1, pleasing advertisers is #2, and on and on.

Many reporters and editors may think informing their readers is important. But when the publisher or ceo calls a meeting, the ad director and general manager (in charge of operations) have more say than the editor-in-chief.

Publishing the full transcript really wouldn't force the interviewer (i.e., Solomon) to be honest. At most, it would allow a few people on the web to see that Solomon was being dishonest. But it has long been clear that Times personnel don't care if a few people know such things. They don't respond to such revelations until such revelations have power behind them. The merits--or the fact that a few people know the merits--play no apparent role in ther culture.

By the way, Russert's complaint was plainly justified, and they more or less acknowledged same. If someone that powerful is prepared to complain, the Times will react. Otherwise, you can pretty much stuff it.

Bob,

If the newspaper's condensation of a quote is a heinous distortion, those few people on the web who find out will quickly tell everyone else, and quite a stink will be created.

Found it interesting that the editor of the Times Magazine, Gerald Marzorati, dismissed Solomon's interviews as "an entertainment." Certainly, they are not an in-depth interview, and that has to be taken into account, but it's not People magazine, either. At least, I never thought that was how I was supposed to take that feature.

A few months back I was reading Solomon's interview of Chris Rock. (I hate the feature, but it's like a car wreck, so I rubberneck.) About mid-way through, Rock was, to all appearances, giving the kind of deadpan un-funny answers that only an accomplished comedian can give. I thought something had gone wrong in the interview process and Rock was screwing with her with these marvelously flat, un-funny answers. Now I'd love to see the transcript and find out just what was going on.

I think they should include their shoe size, blood type and IQ, as well.

Dicksknee is right, and it goes to Glenn's comment.

In fact, Marzorati is being candid, and it's not at all clear that "dismissed" is the right word to use about his comment. Increasingly, media are only about entertainment, especially if you include "providing information that reinforces the biases of the consumer" as a form of entertainment (which I do).

What Kevin asks for may indeed happen, but not in order to "provide information." Rather, it will be to provide fodder for the entertainment of news-junkies and bloggers. And it will only happen if (1) there are enough of them, (2) ad revenue can be generated from it, and (3) it doesn't adversely impact other ad revenue.

I was dismayed to learn just how far Ms Solomon bends the standards of good jounalism. Apparently a question by Ms Solomon might be followed by an answer which had been given by her subject thirty minutes later to an entirely different question.
Though they might be a fun read, Solomon's interviews lack credibility, so I will no longer bother reading them.

I couldn't agree more about putting the full text online. In fact, for quite a few years now, I can't figure out why things like this aren't a lot more widely done throughout the media world. Why, in an academic study, kill trees to provide notes and footnotes--put 'em online! Why, in a non-fiction, current events book, not provide updates (password protected if need be, password provided in the book) online? Why, with magazine interviews, not put the full text up, for the completists/obsessives? Etc., etc.!!

just out of curiousity, kevin, what are the monthly's editing standards for its own zippy q&a, the monthly interview?

This is not original. Robert X Cringely said the same thing years ago, and more generally --- he said that all material related to any interview (including all audio and video recording) should be made available on the web. But, even if Kevin's just following Cringely's lead, it's still a good idea.
Heck, maybe independent invention means the idea is part of the zeitgeist and may even happen.

I find the complaints about this column by seasoned newspeople and celebrities to be a bit ridiculous. Surely, no one interviewed by Solomon at this point is unaware how she works. Boiling down long interviews to short Q&As is an age-old bit in journalism. It's also what journalists do for every story they write. Some go to greater lengths than others to trim or even alter quotes, but she is hardly alone in the practice. What I wonder is since this is "entertainment," why doesn't she allow the subjects to look over the final product before publishing it. Yes, such a practice is verboten in journalism, but this isn't really journalism, is it? I suspect she'd resist this because it would prevent her from shading things to her benefit.

Are people really so stupid as to believe these Q&A's haven't been edited? Seriously? Have you never read a pop culture magazine? A music magazine? The editing is implied with a Q&A. This is a complete non issue.

I have a different idea: publish the entire transcript of the interview on the web.

Here's a thought: Stop publishing goddam fiction and pretending it's news!

Sheesh.

"Are people really so stupid as to believe these Q&A's haven't been edited? Seriously? Have you never read a pop culture magazine? A music magazine? The editing is implied with a Q&A. This is a complete non issue."
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I think that because it's the NY Times Magazine readers like myself expect more credible journalism than from gossip magazines like US or Entertainment. Yes, editing a Q&A interview for brevity, clarity, to correct grammar, etc is accepted practice. but editing which twists the meaning and can make the person being interviewed look foolish is not what I expect from the NY Times. I remember the interview with Tim Russert; it was published on Mother's Day, yet Russert's answers all had to do with his father. At the time, I remember thinking what an insensitive clot! I'm no fan of Russert, but the interview as published was unfair. Here's a bit more from the Public Editor's column on Sunday 10/14:

"Russert, the author of two books about his father, told me that the interview had been presented as an opportunity to talk about his mom on Mother’s Day. Instead, the interview, headlined, “All About My Father,” featured a seemingly insensitive Russert dodging Solomon’s questions about his mother. “I talked at great length about my mother,” he said, but none of it appeared in the published interview. Russert said that Solomon combined questions and took “an answer and transposed it to another question.”

Even putting the editing issue aside, Solomon's column/interview/whatever is horrible.

They do more or less the same thing on radio. Ever notice how all the "uhhs," "ers" and "mmphs" are gone, especially from the interviewer whose reputation as a crystal clear thinker is within his or her zone of interests. Nothing but crisp, clear questions. They allow the classic thought-gatherer, "welll," to preserve the illusion of real time answers. But the questions were probably re-recorded and spliced in after the interview.

JZ -- The claim is not at all that Solomon "boiled down" her interviews, i.e. that those interviews were edited in the name of conciseness, which is of course necessary. Rather, the claim is that Solomon took answers that were responses to particular questions she asked and rearranged things so that they seemed to be responses to other questions she had asked or even to questions that she had never asked but inserted later on -- all this in the name of producing something that was more edgy and provocative than the actual interview. As a retired journalist whose job in part was interviewing celebrities, I can assure you that what Solomon supposedly does is way beyond the bounds. Also, judging by her photograph. Solomon is no youngster; she can't use the "I'm a novice, and no one told me it was wrong" excuse.

And why stop there? Why not publish all interview transcripts?

I never thought I'd say this, but I'd like to second Inaudible Nonsense. I've actually done interviews like that for major magazines, and anyone who thinks that those are an accurate representation of some brief, zippy interview isn't really thinking about it very carefully.

The main problem with interviews of this type is that you want three sentences to your pithy single-sentence question (a process to be repeated about eight times), and usually both parts are about three times as long as anything anyone would ever want to read, ever. If you want the subject to say anything good, you have to prompt him or her with more than just, "Tell us about your new book." And by the same token, the subject will usually drone on quite interestingly for far longer than anyone would care to read.

Great idea.

Again, Solomon's problem is not one of printing interviews that are inaccurate reproductions of what was literally said during an inteview -- given the way interviews go, that is practically impossible -- but of falsely ordering questions and responses to create "new," provocative meanings. For instance, if you answered, "Sometimes yes, but sometimes absolutely no" to the question "Do you like to get up first thing in the morning?" and it was printed as your answer to the question "Do you love your wife?" or "Do you think of yourself as an honest person?" you'd have good reason to think you've been screwed. My examples are exaggerations, of course, but that's exactly the kind of thing that Solomon does.

What's with the scrambled way her name appeared at the end of the article this week? Was this some sort of obscure commentary on the preceding piece? Since I know a bit about typesetting, I imagine it's an indication that the NYT still uses weird, old-fashioned typesetting processes. You fiddle with the kerning or whatever, and the whole thing bumps along and scrambles in some bizarre and unpredictable way with weird spaces and letters falling on top of each other.

I also see this sometimes with my Web "interface," since I always have the font really large to help my poor eyes, and a fair amount of Web sites are too stupid to let their designs flow and adjust depending on fonts and point sizes. (Because the button bumps out of reach, I have to go to my non-usual Web browser to do the little surveys at TMZ.com! How can I express my approval of Kevin Federline and my disapproval of that wicked Britney Spears?!)

Although I would not defend Solomon's manipulation of the printed interviews, I must praise her for two magnificent books. Even people who have little interest in art would enjoy her biographies of Joseph Cornell and Jackson Pollock.

You know, GQ or is it Esquire does the same kind of quirky thing with its interview, one page, of some famous person. with just pithy answers on the page, not even the questions at all, but it was part of a longer real interview, but what appears on the page is a fun read, but a bit dishonest, yes. I always wondered about that....