The interview won't be on your terms

Press interviews can go wrong for a number of reasons. One I've seen often is that the interviewee believes that by stating what they want to be interviewed about, they can stop the journalist asking difficult questions or straying into other areas.

I heard an interview on BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme once in which someone had a press launch of an innovation coming up at 10.00am. Their PR had got them a slot on "Today" when they said they would be launching at 10 - the interviewer pointed out that they'd come on a radio show at 7.30, so presumably had something to say, and the interviewee declined to comment any further. The obvious question, which the interviewer was too polite to ask, was: in that case, why are you on this programme?

Another time they had an interviewee on talking about something and they slipped another question in at the end. The answer was "That's cheeky, you've already asked me to come on and talk about that and I refused."

The fact is, we don't work for you - we might well co-operate and it can work really well, but we're not your employee and you may not tell us what we may and may not discuss.

We'll think it's our interview

When I had a staff job in the 1990s I had one of the worst interview experiences ever. The idea was promising: a PR person had a client who sold into the education sector. They suggested my magazine should sit in on, and report on, a negotiation. We all thought that was a terrific idea.

The trouble started when the client's client turned up 45 minutes late and claimed my publication had changed the time (which was entirely fictional). He then produced an old copy of the magazine, from a time before I worked on it, and said he was following up the interview that had been published in that issue.

This was of course drivel.

He then accused me of not doing my research, said I should have spoken to his PR person who would have explained this was a followup to the original piece. My guess is that this was how she'd sold the idea to him; when we put it to him that we should witness a negotiation, he said that was out of the question.

It wasn't a great interview and I don't think we ran anything. I suspect the main culprit was the troublemaker's PR, mis-selling and failing to explain stuff to the stroppy individual in question and no doubt hoping he'd co-operate once he was on site. He didn't.

His own problem was that he assumed (wrongly) that his PR person had set the meeting up, but even if she'd done so, his assumption that the journalist would be writing what he wanted us to was flawed.

Freedom of speech

The thing is, our duty as journalists is to our readers. We have obligations to our sources and subjects of course. If I write something inaccurate about you, I won't enjoy hearing about it but I'm human and I know I can make mistakes. I will want to correct it very quickly indeed. I am also obliged to be fair. If someone is saying something about you and your company, I owe you the right of reply if I intend to report their comments.

But we have the freedom to ask and write whatever we wish beyond those parameters. Obviously you have the right to decline to answer a question, or to refuse an interview that's unlikely to be good use of your time. Those things stem from the same freedoms that allow us to ask the questions we want in the first place. And very often it's in our interest to ask about the things your business is promoting - when it works, it works very well.

But when you're inviting a conversation with a journalist, remember we're independent, we don't work for you any more than you work for us and we're going to ask whatever questions we think our readers would want us to address. That's how it works and it's unlikely to change. And that's why it's important to prepare for interviews and have strategies in place in case the conversation starts to move away from the areas you want to discuss.