Thanks. Re: your last line, quite a bit of this is possible: we've been building up a list of "safe hands" journalists at FHI for the last couple of years, and as a result, our publicity has improved while the variance in quality has decreased.

In this instance, we (CSER) were positively disposed towards the newspaper as a fairly progressive one with which some of our people had had a good set of previous interactions. I was further encouraged by the journalist's request for background reading material. I think there was just a bit of a mismatch: they sent a guy who was anti-technology in a "social media is destroying good society values" sort of way to talk to people who are concerned about catastrophic risks from technology (I can see how this might have made sense to an editor).