Six things we now know that reporters will quote you on by Matt Guarente

Leaders I'm advising very often ask me, ‘what makes a good quote?’. After giving quasi satisfactory answers for years, we decided to find out. So we analysed almost 400 quotes in Tier 1 business media to see what they’re made of.
Below we summarise six of the things the data analysis throws. But first, why are quotes important?
I spent over a decade as a reporter and editor in financial and business-related publications. Often that meant a half-hour conversation with someone just to eke out a few words that could be used in my third paragraph.
What was I after? Well, I knew when I got it… which isn’t really much help. And if you’d asked me back then I’d probably have just said ‘snappy, and pertinent’.
In fact, while running the equities desk at Bloomberg News, often it was the whole team hitting the phones just to get the quote we needed for the market update. That should tell you something about what reporters want: witnesses. Without quotes, it’s not really reportage – the journalist hasn’t called around a group of people who have better knowledge of the situation than they themselves have, to see what they have to say.
So what works? What gets cut-through? Why did the writers in our research pick some ideas and expressions from those they interviewed, and ignored others?
The articles we researched were from Financial Times, The Times business section, Wall Street Journal, and the business section of the New York Times. In all, nearly 400 quotes were analysed for the following criteria, and the interaction between them:
- What time scale? Is the quote addressing the present, the past, or the future?
- How focused? Is the comment generic, like “markets have a long way to fall”, or specific, like “we think Bitcoin has a 56% upside potential before year-end”?
- What kind of evidential support is the quote relying on? Here we divided between facts, opinions, and analogy to try and define what proof people used. There was one anecdote: kudos to that interviewee.
- Is the language notable? A bit of a judgement call, but consider: “Facebook is stuck in a feedback loop that they can’t get out of” versus “allow Democrats to use normal procedures to pass an emergency debt limit extension at a fixed dollar amount”. The former uses engaging language; the latter does not.
- Does the quote provide explanation, or insight? This may seem like a fine distinction, bit what became clear is that some quotes were used to quickly explain a situation or issue, while others were there to provide context and perspective.
The final thing to note is that we did not make any judgements about the ‘quality’ of the quote: a rigorous editorial process in leading international newsrooms had already determined that these quotations are the appropriate ones to use.
So, what are the things we learned?
Now is the time.
On topicality (which is a big issue for newsrooms as anyone who has heard our explanation of how they work will know), talking about the present is a winner. More quotes (44.1%) concerned themselves with matters of today than the past (18.1%) or the future (also an attractive place for reporters) on 37.8%.
Muted metaphors
I have spent almost two decades telling people that metaphors and analogy are the Ace of Spades when it comes to getting quoted. That does not seem to be true – only 9.1% of quotes we looked at used a metaphorical structure of any kind. So either they’re not the silver bullet we thought they were – or they are, but the reporters just didn’t see enough good ones to quote.
Get granular
Sure it’s nice to have big, sweeping statements but in fact, specific commentary outscored general quotes by almost 3 to 2. However, there was then an interesting split in how the interviewee proved their point. A third of the quotes were from those who made general points, backed up by opinion – perhaps not surprising, because if they used facts it would be more specific. But the next biggest group was a specific comment backed up by a fact – 27.2%. Another significant number, just over 1 in 5, made specific comments but supported it with opinion – such as ‘it’s what the future of Conde Nast should be’.
I want your opinion
Moving on to look more at what people use to prove their ideas, opinion wins. If I am prepping a CEO to talk about the quarter, I know that what reporters want is the sentiment, the way the boss thinks about the results and maybe how she feels about them. ‘We raised EBITDA by 73 basis points’ is not a useable quote. So in our analysis here, we found that 52.3% of the evidential support was opinion. 37.8% was fact- or stat-based. And as we mentioned, 9.1% was analogy or visual metaphor. The rounding-up equates to the tiny statistical number of anecdotes, or where there simply was no discernible proof to what was being said.
Explain, or give insight. Or both.
I often tell leaders who worry about forgetting facts that media interviews are very rarely a test of knowledge; they are a test of insight. However, in the normal run of news there is also a good deal of explaining to be done by people who run functions or are functional experts, and that’s borne out by the research: just over 60% of quotes explain something. 48% give insight or context, and the overlap reflects both, where interviewees delivered insight AND explanation (well done), and some where there was neither attribute (often press releases or corporate statements).
Language lessons
As I spend my professional life trying to help leaders engage more effectively with the people that matter to them, I was a little dismayed that only 36.9% of quotes had a citation for notably engaging language.
An interesting aspect is that on the occasions where engaging language was used, on almost 70% of occasions the quote delivered both insight and explanation.
So even though those quotes using engaging language work harder, it seems a good number of the reporters and their editors were happy to use quotes that didn’t exactly jump off the page.
Conclusion
The research wasn’t meant to provide a template for ‘what to say to get quoted’. It was meant to give the people we advise more insight into how they can deploy various aspects of language, evidence, specificity, and better determine the outcomes they want from their interviews. As with the recent research insights into what kinds of questions reporters ask, it enables us to advise from a solid basis of reality rather than surmise.
(C) Guarente + Company Ltd. 2021
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