Can I Publish A Recorded Interview Conducted For Research Purposes In A Newspaper Or Magazine?

Generally, you should not transcribe and publish in a newspaper or popular magazine material gathered during oral interviews, which were conducted for research purposes. If you inform the person being interviewed that the material will be used in a thesis, dissertation or for a scholarly book and you go ahead and publish verbatim the interview in a newspaper, you will have breached the code of conduct and standard ethics that all researchers must follow. Moreover, you will certainly have lost the trust of the person you interviewed and you may very well find yourself faced with a law suit.

Interviews conducted for the purposes of publication in a newspaper, and those used in a research essay are very different in form and style. People being interviewed for publication in a newspaper will often be much more cautious of what they say and they will be less likely to divulge confidential information or damaging information about others. Interviews for research essays, however, require that people being interviewed be more candid, but at the same their identity may be protected. Additionally, the results of the interview will not usually be published verbatim, but will form part of a research essay.