There’s no way to get a good, rich, nuanced story from a rushed interview, so an invitation to just “drop by for five minutes to chat,” really doesn’t play.
See, the idea of good reporting is to have more information on the story topic than you need to write it up, and to cherry-pick from all that knowledge things to put into the story. Sometimes people write articles with less information than they need to paint a complete picture. It shows.
Rafe
Pro PR Tips 
Rafe, I agree. Interviews serve a purpose to provide direct quotes from say, a CEO or employee, to support points in the story. That is why writing an interesting and in-depth release is the best way for reporters to “cherry-pick” from a plethora of ideas. I say pitch quick, write in-depth, and interview for a few direct quotes.
Isn’t this tip more for journalists? I think we’d all agree that a nice, meaty conversation would be ideal. Alas, we’ve been trained by journalists and bloggers to work within limited time constraints. It’s unfortunate, for the reasons you point out here. It appears the impetus of “tell it to me in 10 minutes” is a result of shrinking news rooms + demand for more content. It wasn’t that long ago that a standard briefing was 30 minutes to an hour. But also, journalists only covered one beat and wrote maybe one article a day.
So then, maybe it’s up to the PR pro to push back a little and say, “If you can swing it, we’d like a little more time to give you the whole story.”
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