Michael Arrington Invents “Roughly Accurate” Interview Reporting

Imagine that you’re reading an article by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. The article details an interview with an important person about an important subject. The article is prefaced with the note, “Quotations below are based on my notes and roughly accurate.”

You might ask yourself two questions: what constitutes “roughly accurate” and how good is Hersh at taking notes?

Of course, Hersh, to the best of my knowledge, has never prefaced an article with such an absurd statement.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, however, has. He sat down with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently, as he details:

I recently had a chance to sit down and have a one-on-one chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. There was lots to talk about, and he answered questions about, among other things, Facebook products, privacy issues, rumors about recent fundraising by the company, and competition with platform developers. Quotations below are based on my notes and roughly accurate.

“Quotations below are based on my notes and roughly accurate.” I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

How it is that Web 2.0’s biggest neo-journalist couldn’t conduct an interview so as to produce quotes that are accurate is beyond me. I know Arrington is a laid back guy who likes to shun all of the useless trappings of mainstream journalism but you’d think that he’d try doubly hard to transcribe accurately the words of the world’s most insightful and entertaining social media wunderkind.

Forget Journalism 2.0. This is Journalism 0.1. Techniques for transcription will be included in a future release.