Quotes are important in journalism and reporting because they tell readers the information in question wasn’t made up by a reporter, but is someone’s account or opinion.
Not all quotes are equal. The best come directly from an interviewee’s speech and are faithfully reproduced. In electronic media these are obvious – you see or hear the person in question saying their own words.
With written media, quotes can be either direct or indirect.
Direct quotes are written inside speech marks and are more or less exactly the interviewee’s words.
I say “more or less exactly” because many journalists, myself included, tidy up, taking out the hesitations, the ums and the ahs. This is perfectly OK. What isn’t acceptable is putting words in someone’s mouth – words they didn’t use.
It would be normal to correct the grammar up to a point.
We often edit – often the reader only sees part of an interview. It wouldn’t be practical to include every word.
Journalists use indirect quotes to simplify and summarise an interviewee’s words, they improve readability.
Most quotes you see in written media come from interviews. Some come from prepared statements.
Organisations use prepared statements to control their message rather than answering pesky questions from nosey journalists whose job is to extract the truth not parrot propaganda.
Prepared statements generally don’t read like human speech. For some reason people think robotic English makes them sound more sincere or knowledgeable. Often the reverse is true.
Journalists don’t always make it clear when they repeat a prepared statement. This isn’t dishonesty. It happens because constantly telling readers where information comes from all the time quickly gets boring. We come from a tradition where the column inches allocated to a story was limited. And we still work in a market where readers lose patience with too much detail.
On the other hand, journalists shouldn’t pull the wool over reader’s eyes.
I tell my readers when a quote is from a statement when I’m writing a news story or feature, but not if I’m writing a two paragraph snippet. Most of the time I also tell readers if a quote is from an emailed response – which may have been written by committee or a social media post.
There’s a fine line between full disclosure and boring readers. But if the story is controversial or important, it is best to take the risk and be candid.