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This is a baffling waste of good information. Reporters are endlessly interviewing newsmakers and then using, at most, a handful of lines out of thousands of words. The paper, of course, may not have room for thousands of words of interview transcripts, but the Web certainly does. Nor does it make sense for the interviewee to give on-the-record interviews that are condensed into a handful of quotes: It’s safer to have your full comments, and the questions that led to them, out in the open, rather than just the lines the author thought interesting enough to include in the article. And for the institution itself, it’s a no-brainer: You get a lot more inward links if you provide enough transcript that every niche media site can find something to point their readers toward. But no paper that I know of makes a habit of including transcripts of on-the-record interviews with major players.
One of the happier consequences of the Pentagon and the State Department’s institutional distrust of reporters is that they often compile and publish full on-the-record transcripts of interviews their senior officials conduct. They’re great tools for bloggers and reporters working on follow-ups, who get to dig through the stuff the interviewer, for whatever reason, didn’t use and repurpose it.
Thinking through this for my own stuff, I wonder how I could make this work. Lots of interviews I do with people in the security sector aren’t on the record, at least not initially. And lots of stuff said on background or off-record pretty easily identify sources. Additionally, sometimes it takes awhile before someone really says anything valuable or feels comfortable answering questions, and s/he might not appreciate having the whole thing posted, leading to an increased reluctance for such people to talk at all. But people might view partial transcripts as suspect, and in any case it cuts against the spirit of Ezra’s proposal. Still, it might be the closest we can get, and it would still be a substantive transparency advance. Alternatively, maybe transcripts of on-the-record interviews are the best/fairest thing to do.
Now to just hire an intern so I don’t have to do all that transcription myself.
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Re: “Lots of interviews I do with people in the security sector aren’t on the record, at least not initially.”
THAT will be tough to keep track of. You’d either have to keep track of the conditions under which your interviewee considers the interview’s confidentiality to have become moot, or you’ll have to call ‘em back to get permission.
And while I doubt I’d ever personally be in a situation where I’d be giving such an interview (my life and responsibilities are either boring or stuff I’d want to publicize,) I can imagine trusting you but NOT trusting a random intern.