A journalist recently posted a warning to PR people that they should never ask a reporter, “Which other companies are you interviewing for this article?”
He argued that the question comes off as controlling, and that journalists shouldn’t be disclosing who else they’re talking to before an article is published.
He makes a very good point. This is true if the reporter is working on a story that involves competitors and the company makes disclosing sources a condition for granting the interview.
That being said, asking who else a reporter has talked to isn’t necessarily an indication that the PR person is being antagonistic or paranoid.
There are often very legitimate and benign reasons for doing so.
As a PR person you may be setting up a CEO or other executive for an interview. This will require preparing a briefing memo that typically answers the following questions for the executive so they can prepare intelligently, and not just go into the interview blindly:
- Who is the reporter and what news outlet are they from?
- What is their beat, and what stories have they covered on this specific topic? Include recent clips.
- What is the gist of the story; i.e., what direction are they coming from and where might they be going?
- Who else have they interviewed?
You will also be expected to have conferred with the appropriate subject matter experts to develop a solid Q&A or talking points.
This is just part of the job you’re expected to do by the people who hired you.
In some cases, you may just need to be straight up with the reporter and say, “Sorry, but I have to ask you this question because my boss is going to ask me, and I need to be prepared.”
If they say, “absolutely not,” then you know you’ve done your part, and you can include that as part of your briefing.
There are other good reasons for asking this question.
If you work for a trade association or in a tightly knit sector, the question “who else have you been talking to” can come from a very different place.
Sometimes it’s about message coordination among organizations so that you’re not stepping on someone else’s turf. (OK, you answer A, B, and C, and we’ll talk about X, Y, and Z.”
Or it could be something as simple as making sure a reporter has access to the right expert.
Within small beats, reporters often volunteer who they’ve spoken to anyway because everyone already knows everyone else—including the journalists themselves.
Like most things in PR, context and intent are everything. There’s a real difference between trying to police a story and trying to be genuinely helpful. Reporters can usually tell which is which.
In my own experience I’ve found that once journalists understand that you’re not there to control the narrative but to try to make their job easier, the dynamic changes. The conversation becomes less adversarial, less guarded, and a lot more productive.
So the answer to the question “should you ask a reporter who else they’ve interviewed” is not a binary yes-no answer.
It’s knowing why you’re asking, what you’re signaling when you do, and whether the relationship you’ve built actually supports that kind of conversation.