Mike Abrams of The New York Times spoke with three members of its tech team — Pui-Wing Tam, a deputy business editor, and two reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac — about how they handle “no comment” responses from companies.’
Here is an excerpt:
Pui-Wing, can you talk about how you work with reporters to consider outreach, particularly to those who are known to brush off reporters or who default to familiar talking points?
PUI-WING TAM: We always want to reach out — even to people who we think will not respond — because we don’t want to surprise anybody and we want to fact check for accuracy. We want to give subjects of our stories a fair chance to comment, add their perspective and correct anything that might be wrong. It can really make a difference for readers to hear what subjects of our reporting have to say. And you never know: People can always surprise you by calling back and providing guidance on an issue.
The strategy for outreach usually depends on the story. Sometimes it makes sense to reach out with an open-ended question and an open invitation for an interview at the outset of reporting. Other times, it makes more sense to reach out later in the reporting process, when we have more information.
Can you talk about a time when a call for comment changed your view of a story?
SHEERA FRENKEL: Some of the larger tech companies we deal with will offer to speak with us off the record, or on background, to give information or nuance on an issue we are reporting. These types of conversations are often a jumping-off point for us to do more reporting. There was one moment last year when a tech company told me I was on the wrong track with a story. They kept using a very strange phrase about their company’s work policies to steer me away, but I realized the story was in what they were avoiding saying.
MIKE ISAAC: Pui-Wing has hammered the phrase “no surprises” into my head since we started working together a decade ago, and I think it’s something every journalist needs to internalize. Fair’s fair, and everyone deserves a chance for comment, especially when appearing in a publication with as large an audience as The Times.
Read more here.
