Normally, I try to avoid pieces/interviews where I am the centre of attention … rather than the story … In this case I was under the impression that she was looking for “background” material to use (with material taken from others) in a more general piece. Hence I wasn’t too worried about the wide ranging nature of the discussion … I thought she had several themes that she wanted to explore and was looking for the odd “sound bite”, (albeit in printed form), which she could quote.

That was probably the first mistake: … to grant two hours to an ‘untrusted’ journalist for a 600 word piece, where a 5 min phone talk would do the trick.

Let me share a few insights that I got from getting engaged in local politics, back in Germany.

1. If you don’t know what you message is, journalists will just make one up and most of the time it will not suit you.

2. Explicitly say what your message is. The journalist will not figure it out.

3. You can vent hot air for 90 minutes and just give one focused statement for up to five minutes. The journalist will use those five minutes because the rest is unusable and any reader of the 600 word piece will be sorry for having missed this “great” two hour speech. I know politicians that are masters of the technique. Sure the 30 people in the room will all be bored to death, but the 1000+ readers of the newspapers will receive them as great presenters.

4. Your call for discussion, like published in your article “Uniquely Kyrgyzstan”, is fine for a touristic specialists magazine, but it is programmed to fail in a general newspaper. The journalist is not deep enough into the subject to understand what you are talking about and the target group of the newspaper is neither.

IMHO in a local newspaper you should focus on changing the mindset of the population towards tourism, e.g. by giving them information about the expectation of the tourists/westeners.
That could be explaining that a “clean city/country” campaign is important because tourists are frustrated if they traveled around the world and sit at a theoretically nice place which is blemished by garbage. The clear call to action: Throw your garbage in the garbage can – it is good for tourism and the economic development of the country.