Damien Soitout
Use old interviews by their date and headline. Four clips exist. Send the reader there and add no fifth story.
The interview already happened. The useful act is to point at the clipping, with its date still attached.
An old interview is a document with a date on it. It says what a journalist asked, and what was printable, on that day. Use old interviews by keeping the date attached and by sending the reader to the clipping. The moment you smooth several clippings into a single fresher story, you have started a new interview that nobody conducted. I have four pieces I am willing to use. They are not one life, told in a tidier order. They are four days of work by other people, and each day had a job.
This is the week before 19 April 2025, which is the third anniversary of the first of them. Three years is long enough that the four pieces start to blur into one story. The useful work is the opposite of a blur. Each clipping keeps its date, its headline, and its job. The biography on this site is the place for the short public account: biography. The press page is the shelf for the clippings themselves: press. Use those doors. Then use the papers.
What to take from a success profile, and what to leave is the rule I wrote when the first profiles were new. Take the kind of piece, the date, and the claim the paper actually printed for the public. Leave the temptation to extend it. Reread old coverage, and add nothing is the same rule on a later day. What the first two quick guides are for is the reading of the business clipping, which is about two books and not about a legend. What still holds years after a profile is a question for a later rereading. Today the work is the four documents in front of us.
The earliest of the four is La Dépêche. The paper's page carries the date 19 April 2022. The address of the article uses 18 April 2022. The headline is “La success story d'un jeune entrepreneur gersois rentré au pays.” It is a local success profile. That is the kind of piece it is. A local paper introducing a person to its own readers, under a headline the paper chose. You can read it here: La Dépêche, 19 April 2022.
A success profile has a shape. It tells a local story of work that went well, in the language a regional daily uses for its town. It is good at saying that a person is known there, and that the paper thought the work worth a feature. It is a poor source for a later biography if you start extracting lines and rearranging them into a fresher narrative. The feature was written for readers of that paper, in April 2022. When I point you to it in April 2025, I am pointing you to a three-year-old feature, not issuing a new one. What to take from a success profile, and what to leave still applies on the anniversary. Take the existence of the piece, the date, and the headline. Read the rest at the paper. The anniversary is a reason to remember that the piece exists. It is not a reason to rewrite it in my voice.
Build and Maintain a Strong Online Reputation is the adjacent craft. A reputation is a set of pages a stranger can open. The strength comes from the pages agreeing with each other because each one is dated and limited, not from a new paragraph that makes them sound like a single press release. If you maintain a reputation by refreshing old coverage into undated claims, you are manufacturing a source. Damien Talks Armagnac on W Radio is a different kind of appearance, a conversation on air, and it stays that appearance. It does not become a fifth written interview because I need a bridge between clippings.
The second clipping is PresseLib, published on 31 May 2022 and updated on 19 July 2022. The paper filed it as a life-change piece. The address is the article itself: PresseLib, 31 May 2022. A life-change interview holds the particulars of the day it was recorded. The path, the household, and the working relationships sit in the paper's words, on the paper's date. The way to use the clipping is to open it. A retelling in 2025 would be a different interview, with the journalist no longer in the room to check it.
This is the clipping people like to mine, because a life-change story feels like a skeleton key. It seems to open every later question. It does not. It opens the page it is printed on. If a detail matters to you, read it in the paper's words, on the paper's date. If you need a shorter public account, use the biography page, which is written as a biography and can be corrected as one. Do not ask a 2022 interview to keep speaking in the present tense. Present tense is how old coverage quietly becomes a claim about today.
How to Choose a Mentor often gets pulled into this kind of piece, because a life-change story likes a figure who helped. A lesson in the clipping stays inside the clipping, in the words the paper used. How to Keep Your Feet on the Ground After Achieving Success is the useful companion on this site: success coverage is a poor place to live. You read it, you note the date, and you go back to the work that has a date of its own. The feet stay on the ground when the clipping stays a clipping.
The third clipping is also PresseLib, 28 August 2022, filed under the paper's label ATYPIQUE. It is a book note. It presents Le poids d'un amour as a second novel, after Nos plus belles années, which the paper places in 2010. The pitch the paper gives is specific enough to repeat as the paper's pitch, and no further. The story follows Dave, a young writer. The setting the paper names is the United States. A student enters the story. The turn the paper emphasises is perseverance. The same note mentions 100 Hours as a period of introspection before another project. That is what the clipping is for: a novel, a previous novel, a pitch, and a glance at an earlier book. Read it here: PresseLib, 28 August 2022.
A book note is not an autobiography with the names filed off. The pitch is the pitch. Dave is the paper's name for the figure in the novel. Perseverance is the paper's word for the turn in the story. If you want the novel, you go to the novel. If you want the note, you go to the note. If you want to know what I was willing to say about the book in August 2022, the note is already that statement. Adding a gloss in 2025 would be a second pitch, written without the editor who wrote the first one.
What Is Newsjacking and How to Use It? is almost the opposite tool, and it is worth naming so you do not confuse the two. Newsjacking takes a fresh public event and attaches your work to it while the event is alive. An old interview is not a fresh event. Using it well is slower. You cite the date, you say what kind of piece it was, and you let the reader open it. You do not borrow the novel's pitch to decorate a business announcement, and you do not borrow a business interview to decorate the novel. Each clipping keeps the job it had on the day it was printed.
The fourth clipping is PresseLib again, published on 18 February 2024 and updated on 26 February 2024. This one I can describe a little further, because its public subject is the books, and the books are objects a reader can still hold. The paper presents the first two volumes of the quick guide, in Kindle or on paper, in French, English, and Spanish. The first is the guide to shorting. The second is the guide to time. The line I am willing to carry out of the article is the paper's own description of the aim: tools used by people who invest, simplified so they can serve as an introduction, and not taught in schools. That is a fair account of what those two books are for. The article is here: PresseLib, 18 February 2024.
What the first two quick guides are for is my own later account of the same pair, and it should match the clipping on the point that matters. Two volumes. More than one language. An introduction, not a secret. A newspaper piece can also contain other sentences, about plans, about a firm, about what might come next. Those sentences belong to February 2024. I leave them in the article. When you use the clipping, use the part that names objects a person can still pick up: the shorting guide and the time guide, in the editions the paper listed. A plan mentioned in an interview is not a book on the shelf. A tool you can buy is.
Reread old coverage, and add nothing is the discipline that keeps this fourth piece honest. The temptation with a business profile is to update it in your head. A number drifts. A project that was a sentence becomes, in the retelling, a finished fact. I would rather you met the February page as a February page. If something in it conflicts with a book you can hold, believe the book. If something in it is a forecast, leave the forecast on the page where it was printed. Forecasts age badly. Guides, if they are in your hand, do not need me to re-interview myself in order to stay true.
The method fits on a card. Write the date. Write the paper. Write the headline or the label the paper used. Write one sentence on the kind of piece: local success profile, life-change interview, book note, or a note on two guides. Link the piece. Stop. Four cards, four links, no fifth story that braids them into a newer and smoother life. The biography page and the press page are the doors on this site. They are menus. They are not a replacement for La Dépêche or for PresseLib.
If you are using old interviews of your own, or of anyone else, the same card works. A profile is a gift from a reporter and a trap for the person profiled, because the profile is better written than your memory and easier to overgrow. What to take from a success profile, and what to leave, What the first two quick guides are for, and Reread old coverage, and add nothing are the three instructions I keep. What still holds years after a profile can be asked only of the sentences that were checkable on the day, and only by opening the page again. This week, the page to open first is the one that turns three years old on Saturday. Read it at the paper. Then close it. The work that deserves a new sentence is the work you are doing now, and it can wait for a journalist if it ever deserves one.
