Tip #15: How to make sure journalists can actually quote you
When an interview produces no usable quotes, journalists paraphrase — and you miss out on telling the story in your own words
In recent tips, I’ve written about how you can deliver better quotes during interviews, but I believe I’ve only made passing references to the alternative: What happens when a journalist doesn’t get a single quote-worthy statement from the interview?
(I’m glad you asked!)
No interview is a waste in the eyes of a journalist. We always want the interview to produce so many great quotes we have trouble choosing just 2 or 3 or 4, but we use interviews for a variety of reasons beyond quoting our sources.
For example:
they provide crucial background on the research,
they highlight key takeaways and implications, and
they allow us to attribute ideas and context to the researcher.
Those are critical aspects of any news story about new research. Still, getting a great quote (or 2) is usually top of mind for most journalists. If, however, we can’t get something worth printing, then the real work starts.
Journalists slide into wordsmith mode, parsing transcripts for potential phrases or words that could be quoted inside of our own writing, or finding ways to paraphrase an 400-word response into a 40-word paragraph.
It’s not an ideal situation, but it’s one that every journalist has dealt with before, and we’re always ready to make those adjustments again.
Since this is a common dynamic around media interviews, I thought it would be worth digging deeper on what journalists do when this outcome occurs.
For Tip #15, I’m going to explain what journalists do when they don’t get any usable quotes, and how you make sure this doesn’t happen to you.
The Tip: How to avoid the ‘no quote’ interview
While there are plenty of benefits to speaking with a journalist about your research, most people are hoping for a great quote at the top of the story.
It can be so rewarding to read your words, surrounded by quotations, in a news story. Those little marks have a special way of adding gravity to your words. The truth is journalists love to quote you just as much as you want to be quoted.
It is a mutual goal. But journalists have a lot of other things to consider when writing their story, and quoting sources for the sake of it shouldn't come at the expense of a well-told story.
The “no quote” interview (a term I just made up) is an interview that produces no long quotes for a full length news article. A long quote typically looks like this:
“As a life-long gamer myself, I don’t find the results surprising,” Sherer added. “Game systems that allow for steady progression have engaged gamers for decades. It makes sense that these types of interventions could be repurposed for mental health treatment.”
This quote is from an article I wrote about research that showed gamification of some mental health tools could offer benefits for young kids with ADHD or depression. It’s a great quote because it highlights a unique perspective from an outside commenter, it explains the importance of the research, and it has an eye-catching quality to it with phrases like “life-long gamer.”
Some interviews produce half a dozen of these quotes and some only produce a few words or phrases worth mentioning. When journalists are faced with the latter, we turn to paraphrases and single-word quotes that look like this:
Talal said the findings “parallel very nicely” with a recent HHS rule change that makes permanent pandemic-era flexibilities around OUD treatment, as it could help facilitated telemedicine address a variety of conditions affecting people with OUD, beyond HCV treatment.
This article about telehealth and hepatitis C featured several long paraphrases and this three-word quote. It was still a productive interview, but it didn’t deliver a strong opening quote.
Still, the most important takeaway here is to know the difference between the two kinds of interviews that produce these very different outcomes.
With that in mind, here are three tricks you can use to improve your sentence delivery during media interviews.
First, understand how it happens.
A “no quote” interview is hard to identify in the moment, even for journalists. It has happened to me plenty of times: I have an interesting conversation with a clinical researchers, I’m excited to turn the interview into a compelling story, then I’m disappointed to find no truly great quotes in the transcript.
While it’s hard to identify, there are some telltale signs you will see in every “no quote” interview.
For example, many of these interviews are dominated by long, elaborate responses from the researcher — the kind that answer 3 or 4 questions in one. They also tend to feature researchers who haven’t spent time reviewing their paper ahead of time. If a researcher has to look up the paper during the interview, they are likely too distracted to provide the kind of answers that deliver both substance and flair — hallmarks of any great quote.
On the other hand, researchers who are too prepared with PR talking points or a list of stats often sound too rigid to provide their unique personal and professional perspective (the kind of human element that leads to more flair).
So you can anticipate potential “no quote” interviews by identifying these qualities in your own preparation and answers: over- or under-preparation, long and meandering responses, and reluctance to share your unique perspective on the topic.
Once you’ve identified these potential issues, you can move on to fixing them.
Second, sidestepping the “no quote” interview.
The best practice for avoiding these interviews is to focus on targeted preparation for the interview. For example, journalists tend to focus questions based on a few key areas of a paper: mainly the methods, results, and discussion sections. They will also use the abstract as the cheatsheet for their own interview prep.
I explain how targeted preparation can help improve your answers in Tips #1, #2, and #3.
Knowing that journalists prepare in very specific ways means you can mimic their process, in a shorter timeframe. In 5 to 10 minutes, you can skip through those sections of your paper, and start formulating potential answers to the important questions, like explaining the research’s implication or main takeaway.
If you prepare for the interview like this, the chance of you failing to deliver a good quote will drop significantly (not in the statistical sense, so much as the anecdotal sense).
Finally, relax before the interview starts.
If you’re like me, you may be watching (read: obsessed with) the Winter Olympics now. I’m partial to curling and speed skating, but I was just watching the women’s Biathlon competition — the one where they ski uphill to a shooting range to shoot tiny targets with rifles they carry on their backs. It’s riveting.
I mention this because the shooting portion of the Biathlon seems like an excellent metaphor for interview prep (yikes, this is beginning to sound like a LinkedIn post). To hit the targets, the skiers have to stop in the middle of the race to focus on slowing down their breathing. This usually happens after skiing up hill (woof)!
If they can stop (in the middle of an olympic race!) to steady themselves for the shooting portion, then you can stop before a phone interview to steady your mind.
If you’ve done your targeted preparation well, then take one or two minutes before opening the Zoom meeting or the phone rings to slowdown (it’s not a race, after all). The slower you talk the better your thinking and answers will be, and the less likely you’ll be to give one of those long, elaborate responses that answers 3 or 4 questions at once.
If you can slowdown, prepare in a targeted way, then you’ll be better able to identify — and avoid — potential “no quote” interviews.
Here’s to taking another step toward being press ready.
One more thing—before your next interview.
If you’ve ever finished a media interview and immediately replayed everything you said, this is for you.
I built the Press Ready Science Interview Prep Worksheet for researchers who don’t need more advice—they need a clear, repeatable way to prepare when time is tight and the stakes feel high.
It’s a reusable, 30-minute system that helps you organize your thinking, deliver clearer answers, and walk away knowing you did your best.
This is also how I fund Press Ready Science—without putting the newsletter behind a paywall.