"said in an interview"

I've always thought that it doesn't matter where the person said whatever is you quote.

"We played to win the game," coach Herm Edwards said in a postgame conference.

Who cares where he said it?

"We here talkin' 'bout practice," Allen Iverson said Wednesday afternoon.

Does it matter when he said it?

It's just my opinion and the way I handle things. Sure, there are exceptions and clarification is necessary, but I just don't see the need when:

"I'm tired of all these stupid-ass questions," manager Hal McRae said.

Is fine.

 

It does matter when somebody said it in many cases.

I wouldn't necessarily point out that somebody said something at a news conference unless it was unusual that they would say that in front of a group of people or something.

Or you might say it to indicate that you got the quotes from another source and weren't there yourself.

But if it's a statement or an email or somesuch, you need to say so. For one, a quote in a "statement" almost assuredly wasn't written by someone else or was filtered through lawyers.

 

So, I do a 12-inch weekly feature on a football player, talk to him and the coach on the phone -- and in that story I should put "said in a phone interview"?

I've never done that.

 

Well, maybe you should start.

It's hard for me not to sound preachy, but I don't know what's so hard about this. Beyond being ethical, attributing quotes is a way for the reporter to protect himself/herself. You're telling the reader how you got the information. We've got to be sticklers on every piece of information that we report -- our credibility as an industry is on the line. (I'm not even going to get into how often Wikipedia is used to report stories, not verify facts.)

I know a columnist, and I'm not going to say who it is, who lifts 99 percent of the quotes he uses from the Internet. He credits the publications that he's stealing, er, using the quotes from, but he's undermined his own credibility by being so fucking lazy. I'm not going to think less of you, CentralIllinoisan, because you talked to a player and coach on the phone. In fact, it's a sign that made an effort to talk to these people yourself.

I think there's a lot of resistance from people on here because they think it's going to make them look bad, or small-time -- as if they had to resort to the telephone (or, heaven forbid, a news conference or a conference call!) instead of taking the time, or having the clout, to do a face-to-face, one-on-one interview. This isn't about that. In the aftermath of Jayson Blair and others, we've got to make sure our readers think we're not making up shit.

 

If any reporter uses "(source) said" in the text, I just assume that reporter or someone in that news organization spoke to that source personally. Otherwise, it gets an attribution.

 

My SE wants us to say, before or after a game, which I guess makes sense

 

I've can see where you're coming from, but we've been specifically instructed to avoid "said in a phone interview" or "said in a conference call" or "said at his weekly media conference" unless it absolutely adds to the story.

I guess it's part of the battle against wordiness in this age of the shrinking news hole.

So I don't really have a choice, because it's pretty much our paper's style to omit this type of stuff. But if I did have a choice, I'd probably still omit it, in the name of tighter writing. There are plenty of exceptions to this "rule," of course, and they've been covered on this thread. But by and large I tend to side with those who would omit this kind of stuff.

 

I don't think it's necessary to elaborate on every setting/situation/

It's your byline. "blah, blah, blah" he said, indicates he said it to you -- whether it be a phone interview, an e-mail, in a dressing room, in a press conference, wherever.
The reader doesn't care if you got the guy by phone, e-mail, or corresponded by carrier pigeon. If the quotes came from a press release or statement, by all means, you say so. If they came in an e-mail, you quote verbatim and indicate that it came in an e-mail, to explain the formality of the quotes.
If you took it from the LA Times, you attribute it to the LA Times.
But "said in a phone interview." or "said in a post game scrum," or whatever, doesn't lend anything to the story. In a one-on-one interview, you can make it clear through the course of the story that it was a sit-down situation with colour throughout the piece. So you don't need "he said in a one-on-one interview in his living room,"

 

So you're saying Blair could not have put in a fake story that somebody told him something over the phone? Because if we put that in the story it means we must be telling the truth? I say your credibility comes from being ethical, not from giving the reader details about how you did your job. You build a reputation by doing it the right way time after time. It doesn't happen by suddenly including a particular phrase. If you report the facts, the reader doesn't care where they came from. Some people seem to think they need to go overboard because of another reporter's sins. If a reader doubts you because of something another reporter did in the past, adding "said in an e-mail" isn't going to change that reader's opinion.

 

If I get quotes from different source materials in a single story, I explain the source on first reference.
So it would be,
Clinton said to the crowd
Clinton told reporters in an interview session
Clinton said in a written statement
In an op/ed piece for the New York Times, Clinton wrote, "...

I don't know why anyone would see anything wrong with that.

 

What about the witer who frequently writers, ``told (paper's name).'' but will use quotes from another newspaper or provided by a writer from another newspaper and simply says, ``so and so said.'' does that mean all quotes not attributed to being told to the paper are lifted from another source?
'

 

If there's a dateline on the story and you use information from a phone interview. you need to say it was a phone interview. The dateline is supposed to tell the reader where you got the information. If it wasn't in the same place as the dateline, you need to say so.