[Ipg-smz] Which of your friends/family have you (relatively unexpectedly) gotten to quote for an article?

[Mark Brownstein]

Online conversion? I'm guessing it was a conversation.

I think I may have interviewed my brother once or twice (he changed his 
last name, so the issue of apparent conflict of interest wasn't a big 
one). He was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard and developed a method for 
printing labels onto CDs. He was named on the patent for this 
technology, and was the right person for the interview.

Interviewing family or friends for articles was extremely rare for me 
(probably just this one time), but I've developed some good friendships 
with people who I've interviewed for news or features. I suspect that 
many of us have formed friendships with people who were, initially, just 
company contacts. (Perhaps my favorite was Tom Rettig -- when he was a 
child actor, he went by 'Tommy Rettig' - he played Jeff on Lassie (until 
he got too old), and is the only person I know whose head was held to 
Marilyn Monroe's breast. He became a database developer, I covered 
databases for InfoWorld, and also wrote a book on dBase 4, and we became 
friends. Other friendships are somewhat less memorable).

On 11/15/2019 7:20 AM, Esther Schindler via Ipg-smz wrote:
> Just idle contemplation here, based on a recent online conversion with my high school sweetheart… who became a successful VC in biotech, and is now retired. I was thinking how odd it was that I never had a reason to ask him for input on a story.
>
> On the other hand, I once got to interview my first cousin, a VP at Warner Brothers (off the record) about the future of movie distribution and the technology needed to accomplish it. And not long ago I quoted a high school friend — who’d become an IT recruiter — for a career-related story.
>
> There’s a particular pleasure in those experiences, at least for me. It’s like discovering another facet to your relationship, and learning something new about a person whom you’ve known your whole life. Something positive, that is, since they are authoritative enough on the subject to obviously have useful information to add.
>
> So whom have you gotten to quote?