One Thing is For Sure, We Didn’t Fuck it Up

So be warned: we're not interviewing you just to post it on our refrigerator.

We published a piece of news today. Then we took it down shortly after. Why, you might ask? Well, it turns out that the news was released to us prematurely before the company in question meant to make the announcement. But that is not at all my problem – we didn’t fuck it up. Read on.

We got all the green lights possible. I received a verbal heads-up that we could go ahead with publishing the news when I met the founder face-to-face yesterday. There was no embargo given to us and people who have worked with us know that we respect embargo deadlines.

Anyway, I hesitated to write a post about it as soon as the founder walked off because I told him — face-to-face — that I needed time to understand his start-up and product. I couldn’t fully grasp his product when he explained it to me verbally.

It’s a fantastic product, so I went off and played with it for quite some time on Facebook. And as promised, I emailed some questions to the founder after I had tested out what his team had developed.

The founder got back to me with some pretty enthusiastic answers. It made the 24-hour wait worthwhile. I wrote a post, published it, and unfortunately it kinda went viral on Facebook.

And then the phone rang…

Within a mere 30 minutes, one of his investors called me up and asked me how that news went public. Well, the founder gave me the green light and I wrote and published it. That’s my job — I’m a blogger. I even forwarded the interview to the investor (as instructed) to show that I got all the information straight from the founder.

And then things started to turn nasty. The investor called me again, but with a harsher tone this time, saying that the email didn’t state that it was okay to publish the news. Well, I explained that the founder gave me the green light verbally. (Additionally, the founder even liked the post and said it was awesome after I sent him the published article.)

But the investor wasn’t pleased with my answer. He told me off, telling me that I went for speed in order to beat other publications to this news. That’s quite a loaded remark.

Yes, like all publications, we’re always on the lookout for exclusives, and sometimes we get them by being speedy. But we do that only when the green light is given to us. And in this case, the founder gave us the green light. And if I were to go for speed, I didn’t have to interview him or do a hands-on with his product. I could have just written and published a post about the news immediately after I learned about it yesterday.

But the telling-off continued. The investor told me that I should have double-checked with the founder before launching the post, and that I should do this in the future. To me it felt like an insult, but I thanked him and hung up the phone.

The founder was nice enough to call me and apologize. He did defend that he didn’t exactly give me the green light… but sure, everyone gets defensive when shit pops up. I understand that.

I’m writing here not just to tell the truth but also to shed some light for all founders and maybe even investors to understand how journalists and bloggers work: If you’re doing an interview with a journalist and you don’t say something is off the record, that means it’s on the record. If you give us information but don’t give us an embargo date, that means it’s on the record and you’re OK with us publishing as soon as we’re ready. If you don’t want information released before a certain date, that’s fine and we’ll respect that — ask anyone we write about. But you need to tell us that. And in this case, the founder did tell me some other things that were off the record, and I didn’t write about those – because I respect those boundaries.