Two errors account for most of the damage leaders do to themselves here, and they are opposite errors.
The first is treating a reporter as an enemy, which produces a defensive non-answer, and a story reporting that the organization declined to explain itself. The second is treating them as a sympathetic acquaintance, which produces forty minutes of candour and one quoted sentence you did not intend to publish.
A reporter has a job. It is not to help you and it is not to harm you. It is to produce an accurate story that people will read, and a leader who understands that can work with it.
Everything is on the record
The default is on the record. Not the parts you designated. All of it, including the exchange before the questions began and the remark on the way to the door.
Other terms exist and must be agreed in advance, out loud, and accepted by the reporter before you say the thing. Retroactive designation does not work: that was off the record, said after speaking, is a request rather than an agreement, and a reporter is under no obligation to grant it.
The terms themselves carry different meanings to different outlets, which is a genuine hazard. On background typically means the information can be used but not attributed to you by name. Off the record typically means it cannot be used at all. Not for attribution usually permits a described source. Because these conventions vary, the practical protection is to state what you mean rather than to use the label: I will explain the background so you have it right, and I do not want to be quoted on this. Can we agree that?
If you would not survive the sentence being printed with your name on it, the safest course is not to say it.
Before the call
You are almost never obliged to answer immediately, and the fifteen minutes you take are the most valuable in the whole exercise.
Ask what the story is about, what their deadline is, and who else they have spoken to. All three are ordinary questions and most reporters will answer them. The third is the most informative, because it tells you what version of events is already assembled.
Then decide two things: the two or three sentences you want in the story, and the single fact you must not get wrong. Write both down. Under pressure people improvise numbers, and a misstated figure becomes a correction, and a correction becomes a second story.
Nothing said is retrievable
A specific discipline follows from that, and it runs against the instinct to be helpful.
Do not speculate. Do not characterise other people’s motives. Do not answer a hypothetical, because the answer arrives in print without the conditional. Do not fill silence, which reporters leave deliberately and which produces more usable material than any question.
And do not say anything about a person that they should hear from you first. That includes personnel matters, which you cannot discuss anyway, and it includes the mildly disparaging aside about a former employee that will reach them within a day.
No comment says something
It is read as concealment, and printed, it functions as an admission that there is something to conceal.
Nearly always there is a real reason you cannot speak, and the reason is more defensible than the refusal. That is a personnel matter and I will not discuss any employee’s situation publicly. That is in litigation and anything I say becomes part of it. I do not know yet, and I would rather tell you nothing than tell you something wrong.
Each of those is a quotable sentence that leaves the organization looking principled rather than evasive, and each costs nothing.
When the story is wrong
Distinguish an error of fact from an emphasis you dislike, because the responses differ completely.
A factual error should be raised directly with the reporter, politely, in writing, with the correct information and its source. Most will correct it, and doing so establishes you as someone accurate rather than someone aggrieved.
An unwelcome emphasis is not an error, and complaining about it damages the relationship permanently for no gain. The framing was theirs to choose. A leader who contests every unflattering angle acquires a reputation that shapes how the next story gets written.
The Idaho version
Local journalism in much of the state is thin, which changes the situation in both directions.
The reporter covering your school district may cover four other beats and have limited time to understand a complicated matter. That means a leader who explains the background clearly, and is reliably available, has considerable influence over whether the coverage is accurate. It also means an inaccuracy, once printed, is unlikely to be corrected by any competing account.
These are also long relationships. The same person will cover your institution for years, and they will remember whether you returned calls, whether you were straight when a story was unfavourable, and whether the last thing you told them held up. That accumulated record is worth more than any individual story and is built entirely in the ordinary weeks when nothing is happening.
A note for public bodies: anything in the record is available whether or not you discuss it. Declining to explain a document that will be obtained anyway means the story gets written without your account of it.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD