posted
I have to apologise in advance for what I'm sure will be a total lack of coherency. It's midnight here, I was up before 7am after only 2 hours sleep trying to pull together a business plan and now I'm trying to get an article out by 10 am tomorrow.
So, my ethical dilemma. I recently had an interview with a CG guy from Industrial Light and Magic who had all sorts of interesting stuff to say. Unfortunately he has a tendancy to ramble on and his sentences and paragraphs are very poorly formed. So while the content is great, excellent in fact, the actual construction of what he had to say needs to be totally reorganised for it to make sense to a reader.
However, my editor likes quotes. Big loving paragraphs of quotes. He likes to make sure the reader knows we've been interviewing some guy.
Now I'm tempted to go and just rewrite what he said, exactly what he said, but just construct it correctly. I've been writing professionally and doing interviews like this for a few years now, but never come across this dilemma before.
Ethically, I think you'd be covered if you sent him the cleaned-up quotes and asked him if the changes are OK. Journalistically, I know nothing about how it's handled.
Dagonee Edit: This sounds like a thought piece, where your not interested in getting unguarded reaction so much as documenting his insights. In more heated, political situations the issue might be a little different.
posted
Well yeah, it's just an editorial about a movie. So not exactly weight-of-the-world stuff.
Funnily enough I've never asked my magazine publisher what their take on this is, primarily because I've never faced it. And I need to get this finished before they open.... heh.
I personally prefer to not do direct quotes, I just feel uncomfortable quoting someone on something they didn't actually say....
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
I suggest rewriting it into clean copy and then getting his approval on it. Tell him you cleaned it up for print but tried not to alter anything of what he said. Ask him to verify that everything is still accurate. Chances are he doesn't mind having his thoughts cleared up a little as long as you don't misrepresent him.
I've had to do that with just about every article I've written off of interviews. People just don't talk in an organized fashion. I haven't run into anyone yet who minds me cleaning up their sound bites a little. If I quoted them exactly like they said it, they would all sound like scatterbrained doofuses who don't know how to form coherent sentences.
I'd say take some creative license with the material to make it sound intelligent, but don't fail to get the guy's (signed) approval on it. My experience has been that if you make them sound really good, they won't mind at all.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
Yeah, that's true.... although if you saw just how bad this guy was... lol.
Not that his content is bad, far from it, just not one sentence is ever finished or even relates necessarily to the next thing he says.
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
I think you would be fine. NPR edits quotes all the time, and they are in radio! If it's journalistically appropriate to edit quotes that are in a person's own voice (for clarity and brevity) then I can't understand why it would be otherwise for your story.
Posts: 894 | Registered: Apr 2000
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posted
I used to edit quotes all the time when I wrote for the newspaper. People never hate you for making them sound BETTER than they really sound. They only let you know it if you make them sound like a doofus (even if it is accurately using their own words)
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