Occasionally, when you do impartial journalism, somebody gets upset. Recently, I managed to get some folks at Toyota Motor Sales a little torqued–enough that a source got in hot water, and a PR person called me to ask if the story could be pulled off the web. Not because the story was wrong, or the details were off–they were dead on. That was the problem-there was a little too much detail.
Now, I didn't get everything directly from the source who found himself in trouble. One word: Google. And nothing we had discussed was “off the record”. But the guy didn't have a PR person with him during the interview, and he may have said more than he should have.
No matter; I would have gotten a good piece of what got him in trouble (some information about a corporate gaffe) without it coming up in the interview.
We obviously didn't pull the story off the Web. I did what I promised: I told my boss they had asked for that. But the genie was out of the bottle.
As it turns out, things have (apparently) calmed down a bit for the guy at Toyota–. And he's learned, as he put it to the PR person, some “hard, fast lessons” about what his company's policies on talking to the press are.
Sean M. Gallagher 