Across our interview scheduling generally, AI researchers are consistently the hardest category of source to book on short notice, taking noticeably longer to schedule than executives or founders with active communications support - a pattern we've come to see as reasonable rather than as friction to eliminate.
Why researchers are harder to schedule
Researchers, unlike executives and founders with dedicated communications teams managing outreach on their behalf, are typically fielding interview requests directly amid a demanding primary research workload, without institutional support prioritizing media availability the way a company's communications function does.
Why we don't push for faster turnaround
Pushing for a rushed interview slot with a researcher risks getting a less considered, more superficial conversation than waiting for a time that genuinely works within their schedule. The quality difference between a rushed and an unrushed research interview is usually noticeable in the resulting piece.
What this means for how we plan researcher-focused coverage
We build in more lead time for researcher interviews specifically, treating the longer scheduling window as a normal feature of this category of source rather than an obstacle, and plan our publishing calendar accordingly rather than trying to force researcher availability into the same turnaround we might get from a well-staffed communications team.
Why we think this patience is worth it
The resulting interviews are consistently more substantive when we accommodate a researcher's actual schedule rather than pushing for artificial urgency, and we think that tradeoff, more lead time for a better conversation, is clearly the right one for this specific category of source.