“Can I just vent for a moment? I have another one for on the black list.” A colleague knocks on my door, very annoyed. What is it about interviewees that gives them the impression they can do a journalist’s job for them, when they are sent their article to read through before publication? Are they surprised by what they said, afraid to lose their jobs? Would they have preferred to write it themselves?
Sending out articles before publication, so that the interviewee can check if there are no factual errors (for example, getting someone’s name wrong; it happens, not a good look), is something we do regularly. Sometimes you miss something important during the interview, or you misunderstood what they said. In those cases, it’s good that the article is checked before it gets sent to the printer. Even though we are not, in fact, obligated to. As with many national newspapers, we do not offer interviewees the right to read through as standard. It’s more of a gesture, good etiquette if you’ve written an article about something very personal or a very sensitive topic.
Nine times out of ten, everything is fine and there are only minor comments. Excellent. But there are cases that make you feel like your professionalism is being questioned. As if you’re just some random nobody scribbling words. You open Outlook and read, ‘Article looks good, I just have one or two suggestions’, then open the attachment and almost fall off your chair in shock. More tracked changes than not. All the jargon you’ve removed (a lot of people speak in buzzwords, from ‘roll outs’ to ‘bringing vision to a community’) has been added right back in. Who needs clarity, right? It’s worth noting that the higher up the person is, the less they comment on the writing. Rianne Letschert and Jan Smits, who were both interviewed for this issue because they are leaving, made (almost) no corrections. Are they now such veterans that they know no fear?
A few years ago, we had a colleague who gave such messages short shrift: ‘Thank you for your email, I’ll look into it, cheers’, he’d write – usually before ignoring every single suggestion. That is not how the current editorial team works.
What most people don’t know, is that they end up on the ‘blacklist’ (or ‘very dark grey’, if we’re feeling merciful), a list of names that only exists in our minds. And yes, another name has indeed been added.