What to Expect When Inkego Reaches Out for an Interview

If you're reading this, there's a good chance one of our editors sent you a note and you're doing exactly what you should be doing: checking whether we're real. Good. A cold email from a newsroom you've never heard of, offering to interview you for free, deserves a healthy dose of skepticism. This piece is our attempt to answer the obvious question — what actually happens if I say yes? — before you have to ask it.

The short version: we have a clear, boring, professional process. There are no surprises, no pressure, and nothing to pay. The longer version is below, step by step.

Step one: the first email

Our outreach always comes from an @inkego.com address, and it always names a specific editor. It will tell you three things: who we are, why we're interested in you specifically, and what kind of story we have in mind — an interview, a profile, or an expert column. If a message claiming to be from Inkego doesn't do those things, or comes from a free email account, treat it with suspicion and write to editorial@inkego.com to verify.

We try to be specific because vagueness is the hallmark of a scam. If we say we found your recent paper interesting, we'll tell you which paper. If we mention your company, we'll say what caught our attention. You should be able to tell, from the first message, that a human being read something you made.

The point of the first email is not to close a deal. It's to give you enough information to decide whether the conversation is worth your time.

Step two: a short call to align

If you're interested, we'll usually suggest a brief introductory call — fifteen minutes, no recording — to make sure the story makes sense for both of us. This is where we confirm the angle, agree on what's on and off the table, and answer any questions you have about the process, the outlet, or us. It's also where you can tell us if there are topics you'd rather not discuss.

Plenty of people use this call to ask the blunt questions: Who pays? Where will this run? What if I hate the result? We'd rather you ask them now than worry about them later. The answers, for the record, are: nobody pays anybody, it will run in one of our partner publications that we'll name for you, and you'll see the draft before it goes anywhere.

Step three: the interview

The interview itself is usually a Zoom conversation lasting around two hours, though we can split it across two sessions if that's easier. We record it — with your knowledge — purely so we can quote you accurately.

Before the call, we send you the main topics we'd like to cover. This isn't a script, and you don't need to prepare answers word for word. It's simply so you're not ambushed and can gather your thoughts on anything technical. Most people find the conversation genuinely enjoyable; it's rare to be asked thoughtful questions about the thing you know best by someone who did the reading.

What we won't do

• We won't spring "gotcha" questions designed to embarrass you.
• We won't ask for money, bank details, or anything that has nothing to do with the story.
• We won't publish anything you told us was off the record.

Step four: we write and fact-check

After the interview, our team writes the piece and fact-checks it. Fact-checking means we verify names, dates, figures, and claims — sometimes by coming back to you with a short list of clarifying questions. This step is unglamorous and slow, and it's the reason our stories hold up. If we can't verify a claim, we either attribute it clearly as your view or we leave it out.

Step five: your draft review

This is the step most people care about most, so we'll be explicit: you always see the draft before it is published. You can correct factual errors, flag anything that misrepresents you, and request reasonable edits. What you can't do is rewrite the whole thing into a marketing brochure — this is journalism, not advertising, and keeping that line clear is what makes the coverage worth having. In practice, disagreements are rare, and when they happen we work them out like adults.

We wrote a whole separate piece on this because it matters so much: You'll Always See the Draft.

Step six: publication

Once you've signed off, we place the finished piece with the partner publication whose audience fits best, and we tell you where and roughly when it will run. On average this takes about ten days from interview to publication, though it depends on the outlet's schedule.

When it publishes, you get a link and a set of "as featured in" assets you can use on your own site or profile. That exposure — a real byline in a real publication — is the entire reason the arrangement works for you. It's also why we can offer the interview for free: our business is syndicating stories to publishers, not charging the people in them.

How long the whole thing takes of your time

A fair question people rarely ask up front: how many hours is this actually going to cost me? We think it's only respectful to be precise, because your time is the one thing we are asking for. Realistically, expect a fifteen-minute intro call, the interview itself of around two hours (occasionally split into two shorter sessions), perhaps twenty to thirty minutes answering any fact-checking follow-ups, and an hour or so reviewing the draft. Call it four hours, spread over a couple of weeks, most of it at times that suit you.

That's genuinely the whole commitment. We don't need you to write anything, produce anything, or attend a series of meetings. One good conversation and one careful read of the result is the shape of it. We mention this because a surprising number of experts assume being interviewed is a huge undertaking and quietly decline on that basis. It isn't. It's a coffee's worth of conversation and a proofread, in exchange for a professionally reported story about your work.

A word on trust

We know that everything we've written here is also, in theory, what a sophisticated scam would say. So don't take our word for it. Look at our named editors, each with a real bio and a real history. Check that our emails come from our domain. Read our editorial standards. Ask us hard questions and see whether the answers are consistent. Legitimacy isn't a claim you make; it's a pattern you can verify. We've tried to make ours easy to check.

Red flags that mean it's not us

Because impersonation is a real risk for anyone who publishes outreach publicly, here's a short checklist you can use to catch a fake claiming our name. Treat a message as suspicious if it does any of the following: asks you for money, payment details, or a "processing fee" of any kind; comes from a free email account rather than an @inkego.com address; pressures you to decide immediately or keep the opportunity secret; refuses to name a specific editor or point you to that editor's profile on this site; or asks for passwords, identity documents, or anything unrelated to producing a story.

Genuine Inkego outreach does none of those things. If a message sets off any of these alarms, don't reply to it — instead, forward it to editorial@inkego.com and we'll confirm whether it really came from us. We would always rather field a "is this you?" email than have someone burned by a fake using our name.

If that all sounds reasonable — and we hope it does — the next step is simply to reply to the editor who wrote to you. And if we haven't written to you yet but you think you should be on our radar, you can always put yourself forward.