I do a lot of interviews. But I’m doing fewer and fewer of them as time goes on because it seems like the odds it’ll create negative PR increases as our company becomes more successful.
If you do an hour long interview, you provide a lot of potential fodder. How it is used often depends on the “narrative” that the journalist is trying to get your interview to fit. That is, often there is a headline that the journalist is looking for and will scour your words to find something that can be fitted to that.
So next time you read an article that quotes me and it sounds like I’m criticizing something or saying something sensational the odds are, it’s a quote taken without context (not just out of context but pretty much without context). People who know me “in the real world” know I follow an axiom of “do not criticize fellow developers”. But, at the same time, I also say a lot of things when I talk (as opposed to when I write) that are meant to be funny but can be turned into pretty much anything when written.
If you want to get an idea of what I’m talking about, listen to the Jumping the Shard Podcast. Specifically, pretend you’re a journalist trying to come up with something sensationalized to drum up page views and imagine all the sensational stories you could mine from my podcast.
The JTS podcast gives you a pretty accurate account of what I’m like in real life. Then compare it to how articles that claim to quote me. The difference is called the narrative.