Cooperating With Reporters n 181 Chapter 14 Cooperating With Reporters nterview shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20 that seem to show reporters at work actually present a very misleading picture of the job of the journalist. Unless you're a celebrity, public official, corpo- rate spokesperson, or criminal, the reporter will not usually function as your adversary, trying to coax or trick you to reveal information you'd be better off concealing. Instead, the reporter ordinarily tries to get out of you the story or expertise that is yours to share, in a form that makes sense to the audience. Other erroneous expectations may come from horror stories you've heard from others who claim to have been grievously misquoted. But rather than approaching the prospect of being interviewed with para- noid apprehension, you can take steps to improve the odds of being accurately quoted. Also, even indisputable misquotations are not al- ways the disaster you might assume they'd be. Years ago, a consultant I know was the subject of a long, front-page feature story in The Wall Street Journal. Disgusted at the snide tone and inaccuracies in the story, she showed me a copy of the story with more than a dozen factual errors circled. Yet she also revealed that, years later, she was still receiving calls from potential clients and press inquiries trace- able back to that story from as far away as Tokyo. Similarly, book publishers have long claimed that any review, even a blisteringly negative one, works better than silence--because it gets the word out. Readers are quite capable of disregarding the writer's attitude and making up their own minds. As someone who has sat on both sides of the interview encoun- ter, I can clue you in on the agenda, methods, and constraints of I N 181 n