Imagine being asked one day, "Would you like to see your FBI file?" You'd say "Yes," right? But then ask yourself a different question: "How will it make you feel to know all that information?"
I recently got about as close as one can get to this experience. While reporting a story on Microsoft's video blogging initiative – something called Channel 9 – the dossier that Microsoft and its outside public relations agency Waggener Edstrom keeps on me accidentally ended up in my email inbox.
As journalistic windfalls go this is about as good as it gets. There I was writing a story about how Microsoft is on the cutting edge of using the Internet to become more transparent, and there in front of me are the briefing documents they are using to manage the story. The timing was so fortuitous that I wondered whether it was intentional. When I told Microsoft about it, they convincingly told me it was not.
But after I was done reading all 5,500 words I no longer felt elated at the prospect of an interesting scoop. I felt downright peculiar. I've been a journalist for more than 20 years and always assumed that the people I interview do as much homework on me as I do on them. So the existence of a document like this didn't surprise me. But that still didn't make it any easier to read lines like, "It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient." I know my long-windedness drives my wife nuts occasionally. I didn't know it had become an issue for Microsoft's pr machine too.
It also was strange to see just how many resources are aligned against me when I write a story about Microsoft. Microsoft set up interviews with the head of Channel 9 while I was in Redmond, it allowed me to follow him and an associate at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and it allowed me to interview two other executives involved in the project on the telephone.
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