I don't know about you, but I find it's impossible to control the conversation with a reporter. A professional like a PR person or a press secretary may be abl

I don't know about you, but I find it's impossible to control the conversation with a reporter. A professional like a PR person or a press secretary may be able to have a whole conversation without saying anything that can be misconstrued, but no ordinary person can-- especially not when they're excited about an idea. You say one or two hundred sentences, and they pick the one that, quoted in isolation, will seem the most controversial. I was even hosed this way once by Steven Levy, who is one of my favorite reporters. He came to several dinners during one YC cycle. I must have talked to him for hours. I explained all the nuances of how YC works. Out of all that he ends up quoting me as saying that someone who turned us down would be failing an IQ test. [And before anyone starts jumping up and down about that one again, I meant it in the narrow sense of someone who didn't understand that all we have to do is improve a startup's prospects by 6.4% (http://paulgraham.com/equity.html http://paulgraham.com/equity.html) for the founders to end up net ahead.] But you can't just blow off the press. The best you can hope for is that if you do a lot of interviews, collectively the resulting articles will form a sort of Giacometti drawing of the truth.