In my experience, journalists approach academics with two different motivations:

1. Intellectual background – They really just want to learn enough about the (likely unfamiliar) topic to be confident synthesizing information, and perhaps also to to defend presentation choices to their editor. The conversation is fluid, like an office hours meeting with an enthusiastic student. In the end, you might not even be mentioned in the article, though you’ll likely be able to trace your influence on its themes.
2. Quote mongering – They already have a plan for the piece and know what they want to say. But journalists can’t float ideas freely; they need an expert source to attribute the viewpoint. (Quotes are to journalists what intuitions are to philosophers – but obviously not as easy to come by.) They will try to coax you into saying something pithy, straight-forward, and ideally provocative. Your argument for the quote is less important and may be ignored entirely in the article.

This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy. In practice, journalists often have a mix of both motivations, and can even switch between them in the course of a conversation.

But the key thing to notice is a tension between these motivations, from the philosopher-interviewee’s perspective. Conversations with journalists of the first type will be much more philosophically rewarding, but less likely to raise your public profile. Conversations of the second type will get you more attention, but may obliterate nuance to the point of misrepresenting your views.

I think Monsó correctly describes the second sort of conversation. Sometimes it is possible to steer a journalist from the second motivation toward the first. But often that is impossible – the journalist wants the quote and nothing else (they are writing to deadline, it’s too late to change the piece’s narrative, etc.). If it’s clear you’re talking to a journalist with that motivation, then you take a risk providing them the kind of quote they want.

Hello — I’m a journalist at Vox who frequently references philosophical work in my articles. Justin asked me to pop in to give the media perspective on this issue.

Candidly, I think most people in my profession don’t understand philosophy. I don’t mean just that they haven’t read the key texts in an area, though that’s likely true. I mean that they do not understand what philosophical inquiry is and what philosophers can contribute to public discourse.

There are some exceptions. Typically magazine feature writers, opinion columnists, and “ideas” writers will be more knowledgable than a straight news reporter. At some publications, like Vox, there’s an institutional culture that takes philosophy seriously. But as a rule, journalists aren’t very philosophically informed.

This doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t talk to us! It just means that you need to start with the assumption that your interlocutor isn’t familiar with what you’re talking about and will likely have a skeptical editor. So how do you deal with this?

Back when I was a philosophy student, I sat in on a job talk where one of the senior faculty members told the candidate (who was not a specialist in the candidate’s area) to “treat me like a junior-year philosophy major.” When it comes to journalists, treat us like freshmen in an intro class: we wouldn’t be reaching out if we weren’t interested, but also have little in the way of baseline knowledge and may not be taking another philosophy course again.

Try to be as accessible as possible, connecting your work and knowledge to the applied questions the journalist is doubtlessly interested in. Prof. Zollman’s advice cited in the actual post provides some more helpful guidelines on how to do that.

That’s the “how” question. But what about the “why” question: if we mostly don’t really know what we’re talking about, and might mangle your ideas in service of a quote, what’s the point in talking to journalists at all?

Beyond the obvious — things like spreading your ideas and getting your name out there — there are broader intellectual stakes. The minority of journalists who are philosophically inclined need your help: we need to prove to the rest of the profession that philosophers have vital things to say, that the public conversation is lacking absent your voices. Engaging with journalists, even more skeptical ones, is a way of helping strengthen and deepen the nature of democratic deliberation itself.

This is especially true for those of you who work in normative areas. Currently, the public discussion of political and social values is dominated by some combination of economists, social scientists, and activists. These groups all have something worthwhile to contribute, but none of them have the normative sophistication that philosophers do. I know this, and you know this. But the vast bulk of people don’t. So help people like me prove it.

I’m biased on this score for somewhat obvious familial reasons, but I think bioethicists have done a good job on public engagement during the pandemic. They’ve benefitted from the fact that the defining trait of a good journalist is curiosity: we go into this field in part because we want to learn new things, generally from other people. Engage us in that spirit and I think the conversations should work out well.

I suspect there might be significant differences between ‘journalistic cultures’ between different countries/regions, so I think it would help if commentators would mention from which geographical location they write. My experience with journalists from Belgium and the Netherlands is overall positive, but I benefitted a lot from “media training for scholars and scientists” that was given by trainers who worked in journalism themselves.
Here are some key experiences/insights/recommendations:

• for written media, always request before accepting to give an interview that you can read and edit the text before it goes into print (in the netherlands, that is standard practice – in fact, so standard that I’ve stopped asking it before accepting. But a British magazine recently refused this request, saying that “this is not their practice”. I would decline giving an interview if I cannot check what will be in print, because (a) there are often errors of misunderstanding (which journalists are always willing to change in my experience), and (b) sometimes the framing is misleading. My experience, with one or two exceptions, is that as long as the word-length of the piece remains the same, journalists will happily accept any revisions you propose.
• for television/radio, there is no editing necessary, but the main insight from media training is: know what the point is that YOU want to get across. Don’t just answer their questions, but try to bring to the table the insight you want to get across to a wider public.
• The decision whether or not to accept an invitation for radio/television, I make dependent on the [track-record of the] program. There are some programs where the interviewer is likely to be rude, aggressive, and very likely to interrupt. For those kinds of programs, one has to be willing and (mentally) prepared to do the same in order to not be ‘slaughtered’. I would only do this if one would reach a large enough audience that is unlikely to otherwise hear about the ideas or insights that you want to talk about.
• as with teaching and most other activities we do: doing more of it, being willing to learn, and trying to sollicit feedback, makes one better at it. One important thing to get used to, and to get experienced in, is to get a sense, during the interview, of what one can and cannot explain to a particular journalist (and to a non-academic/non-philosophical audience in general). The biggest challange is often how to “translate” (=simplify) complicated arguments into something that is understandable to a broader audience.
• why speak to journalists at all? Perhaps it’s not helpful for all fields of philosophy, I don’t know. But in applied ethics and political philosophy, it surely is. Take climate ethics. It really is not that difficult to disseminate some basic insights from that literature with an interview. But one can also get some basic insights from ‘solid reasoning’ across (from which the quality of public debate would hopefully benefit). Today, a journalist talked to me for 35 minutes about the government measures against COVID (restrictions etc.). He asked me three times (in different wording) whether I felt the government had done a good job, and what my judgement was. I sensed he was looking for a juicy quote, but I refused to give it. I explained him why I could not answer that question, not because I didn’t want to [help him write his piece], but because necessary information was lacking to make that judgement and that, in my view, no-one has that knowledge. He ended up putting my explanation for why I think we have to be careful not to judge too quickly in such complicated conditions in the piece. So I think one really can get some basic insights, and also some typical philosophical ways of reasoning into the media.
• And then there are the numbers: with national media it’s easy to reach hundredthousands or even millions of readers/viewers/listeners. Even if a small fraction of those readers/listeners/viewers learn one basic insight from philosophy, I would consider this a huge gain.

I’m a broadcast journalist of over 40 years. I just did this interview with philosophy professor Alexis Elder last week. And although my philosophy minor (and broadcast journalism major) is fairly old now, I don’t remember anyone explaining that – or why – what I do is “morally indefensible.” See, I thought that characterization only applied to things like stereotyping people you don’t know.