Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Email interviews - magical conversion to gibberish

I occasionally get requests from journalists to provide answers to questions they send by email. The resulting exchange is then often printed as if you had been interviewed in person.

It can be annoying when perfectly good written sentences are often transformed into grammatically incorrect sentences that make you sound like a complete idiot. Or even worse, factual inaccuracies are introduced and it looks like you don't know what you are talking about.

Case in point. I ended up in the Digital Life PC Show supplement talking about how I use an Asus Eee PC. The picture seems to be lifted from another magazine (probably CIO).

The strangest edit came in the section where I had said that because the Eee PC used an SSD memory drive as a hard disk, it was more rugged. This became
the phrase "the Eee PC is in a solid state".

I sure hope so. It would be bloody difficult to use in a liquid or gaseous state.

The resulting article that ran is here as a .PDF

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