I’ve got a piece up on decider.com today, an interview with Austin City Council place 1 candidate Chris Riley. It’s for a feature called ‘Debaser’, where the subject gets to plug whatever it is they’re selling – usually a CD, or a show they’re putting on, or something like that – in exchange for telling an embarrassing story about themselves.

The piece came out kinda okay, I guess, but it was a frustrating one to work on. Riley’s a nice guy, and I’m leaning his way in the election. And, while his opponent Perla Cavazos has picked up a lot of momentum in the past two weeks, he’s still likely to take the spot. But there was a real challenge in trying to get anything from him that couldn’t be found on his website. He was definitely in “campaign” mode throughout the whole thing, and it makes for a boring read. The draft I turned in was 1,300 words, and the one that ran is about 650. The half of the interview that was cut doesn’t really tell you anything else about the guy, though, and it was smart of the editor to run it as a short one. I thought some of the questions that were cut were interesting, but just because you ask a guy who was on the board of directors for the regional ACLU if it’s weird getting the police endorsement, it doesn’t mean you get an answer that isn’t, essentially, “cops are good people, civil liberties are good things, we should all figure out what to do”. It was all coming from a place where the primary objective was to not say anything that might alienate anyone – which makes sense, but which also makes it hard to reach anyone.

It’s a little frustrating to see a piece that you thought had a lot of potential end up fairly inessential. I mean, not everyone in a Debaser feature is going to tell the story that Ben Webster of Attack Formation did about pooping his pants in front of his girlfriend and her mom, but I’m definitely learning, as a journalist, where you can and can’t expect much in the way of candor.

In other, kinda-related news, I did sit down with Mr. Lif for a while at SXSW, and that was a guy who can talk. The piece won’t run on Decider until his next tour kicks off, but it definitely stands in contrast to the interview with Riley. But, then, Lif isn’t running for anything.