Mark Cuban Refuses Our Interview

By Alan Cohen and Mike Orren

When we asked Jeff Cuban for an interview on HDNet's True Music video series, he instead offered us an interview with his brother, Mark. On Friday, July 28, he suggested that we email our questions and that he would pass them to Mark for response. Alan emailed the questions on Sunday, July 30. He called Jeff on Monday the 31st and Jeff confirmed receipt of the questions and hurried off the phone. By Wednesday, August 2, we had no response and Alan again called Jeff. Jeff questioned our "negative approach" but said that he would send the questions to Mark.

Below is the email chain that followed that conversation. We recommend reading the questions before reading the exchange below, otherwise the wit of Mark's response may be lost on you.

The exchange is unedited, save for the removal of email addresses.

 

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 From: Mark Cuban
Reply-To: Mark Cuban
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2006 11:39:00 -0500
To: <alancohen@pegasusnews.com>
Subject: Questions

Before I answer any questions and provide content for your commercial enterprise, I would like to know what rights I have to the content and what participation I have in the economics

Am I to do this purely as an altruistic effort that benefits your company, or is there some value to me or the companies you reference that I'm not aware of ?

Is pegasus news just the long tail of entertainment news reporting or is there a reach I'm not aware of ?

Curious before I invest time to answer the questions

Thanks

Its Mavs Time ! Www.mavs.com
The best programming is on HDnet www.hd.net

Thx
M

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 -----Original Message-----
From: Mike Orren
Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2006 12:26 PM
To: 'Alan Cohen'; 'Mark Cuban'
Subject: RE: Questions

Mark, the value to you is this:

We have a story that includes as one facet a bunch of bands who aren't happy about DVDs coming out without their knowledge, even though they signed a broad agreement. That goes double for the ones who performed as part of a benefit. We don't think there is any bad intention here, but we don't know that without a response from someone in your organization.

You get no rights or participation in any commercial profits from this interview. But you have full rights and participation in any and all negative publicity that comes from your unwillingness to answer some perfectly reasonable questions about HDNet's business practices.

You can make your own judgments about our reach based on our traffic stats. http://www.pegasusnews.com/blogs/notmusic/2006/aug/01/tntjuly/

On Friday, Jeff eagerly agreed to an interview with you, on behalf of HDNet. In fact, we had planned to interview him and he offered you up instead. As soon as he saw some questions that weren't softballs, he clammed up. We submitted these questions to Jeff on Sunday. We got no response at all until Alan pushed him today. Typically, when communication shuts down like that, you get an instant "The company declined comment." We've waited, bending over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt.

We'll publish something this week with or without your participation.


-Mike Orren

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Pegasus News

www.pegasusnews.com

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214.514.4710

 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Cuban
Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2006 12:59 PM
To: Mike Orren; Alan Cohen
Subject: Re: Questions

Nothing like a good threat...

I will pass.

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As a bonus, here's what Mark said in a 2004 interview with the Memphis Commercial Appeal about why he started his blog:

Despite best intentions of most media, they don’t have the space, inclination or knowledge to write in-depth on many different subjects. When those subjects are important to me, I want an outlet that wasn’t space or time constrained to give an indepth pespective...

Or, I can post this entire email exchange and then watch and see what is actually written.