A client once forwarded a profile from a well-regarded trade publication, pleased with it before we'd even opened the link. A journalist's byline, an editor's masthead, four hundred words under the company's name. Read closely, nearly all four hundred were the founder's own answers, lightly stitched together by a question the reporter had asked.
The publication was real, independent of the company in every ownership sense that matters. None of that made the piece independent coverage of the subject. What makes a source independent is not where it ran or who signs it; it is whether anyone besides the subject did the work of finding, checking, or judging what's in it.
Independent content means original writing that is not attributable to, and does not just restate, material provided by the subject or its associates.
A transcript with a byline is still a transcript. The reporter asked, the founder answered, and the answers went to print roughly as given. Nobody outside the company verified the roadmap claim, checked the revenue figure against a filing, or asked a competitor whether the framing held up. The piece exists, and reviewers can see that it exists; what they look for is whether it does anything besides exist.
The test we now run is mechanical. Strip the quotation marks from the piece and read what's left. If a paragraph collapses to nothing once the subject's own words are removed, that paragraph was never independent, regardless of the masthead above it. If a paragraph survives, an explanation the reporter dug up, a number checked against a separate source, a critical aside, that's the material worth citing.
It is a smaller pool than most drafts arrive with. A folder of interviews reads like proof of interest; run through the strip test, it is often proof of access. The two are not the same thing, and only one of them is what the guideline is asking for.
