In The News

I got interviewed for a longer newspaper article about the robots last Thursday, just before leaving for a family vacation in Michigan. The final article appeared in the Star Tribune this past Wednesday. I thought the interview went really well; it was a lot of fun, actually. I talked to the reporter for about half an hour, and I explained everything that Fritz, Bruce, and I had done this summer, and talked about how cool it was.

I’m not very happy with the result. (Note that you may have to sell your soul and register to read the article online).

The article sounds completely different; she made it sound like I did everything, and that really bothers me. I feel like I’ve done something wrong, because it sounds like I’m bragging and taking all of the glory, even though I didn’t say it that way in the interview. I always get excited when I’m talking about my interests, and I didn’t think about how some of what I said sounds like out of context. I especially don’t like how quotes that contained pronouns get replacements in square brackets [like so]. I’m sure it would violate journalistic rules or something, but I think it would be better if the pronouns just got replaced appropriately.

I suppose I should just chalk this up to inexperience, since I’ve never been interviewed before. I don’t know if any of you have had a similar issue, but I feel like my words have been twisted.

I know I should be happy that I’m in an article in a newspaper with a large circulation, but I have the same hot feeling in the back of my neck that I get when I feel guilty about something. I feel like I’ve taken credit for something I didn’t do just because the information about other people got omitted for brevity’s sake.

If I sound snarky for the next few days, it’s just because my guilt and humility meters are out of whack because of this article. As one of my high school friends just said, “You always end up sounding like a jerk in interviews”. Why is that?


Comments

4 responses to “In The News”

  1. Reporters never quote you accurately. It doesn’t matter if it’s an hour-long interview, or a one-sentence response — they will always screw it up, and frequently they’ll do it so badly that it completely changes the meaning of what you said. So don’t feel too bad about it, since it’s not your fault.

  2. You should see the last time I was news-papered. They wanted a local teen perspective on internet censorship, so I said that sometimes parents shoudl spent more time with their kids, rather than letting the internet raise them. This turned into something like “Ross Messing, a Pittsford teen, supports censorship”.

  3. during summer school in 2000 there was an assembly where a local politician came to talk about politics. at the end, me and another kid went down to where she was standing chatting with people so we could ask her questions and stuff. i had also been one of the people who had gone down to the microphone during the question and answer period. i was really into politics at that time and fairly knowledgable compared to otehr highschool pre-sophomores. so anyways, after we’d each gotten our chance to fangirl/fanboy the politician, a newspaper reporter asked us both for a highschooler’s perspective on politics, the elecition, etc. i said something about how i was really interested in politics and had learned a lot from debate and a few of my teachers, but, as a whole, teenagers don’t really pay so much attention because we can’t vote yet so we don’t know much about it. so, as one of the more politically-conscious teenagers at this event, someone who cared enough to linger instead of leaving the auditorim to wait for the buses and eat vending machine foods with the other kids, my quote was “we don’t know much about it.” susan zell, local damned ignorant teenager.

  4. Maybe she had a Quick-Quotes Quill. :)

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