I suspect if you asked reporters they'd say it was this way with most of the people they talk to. In fact, I have some evidence already that it is. Steven Levy told me that he hated it when people told him stuff off the record, because he couldn't use it. If it wasn't the truth, he wouldn't care.
Because that, not off the record generally which Dan spends a whole paragraph defending, is the relevant bit.
I do still disagree with him slightly. It's not hard to imagine things one might want to tell about themselves only off the record. Especially about one's health: there are lots of medical conditions someone might be embarrassed to have other people know about.
But I was wrong to suggest that he distrusted off the record statements generally. It should have set off warning signals that I was accusing an experienced reporter of making such an elementary mistake.
One reason I didn't read the article was that it was so long. That's probably one reason people so often do this to me.
It seems like a lot of the time when people do this to you it's because they've skipped over one of the qualifiers to your argument, especially when the qualifier comes a couple paragraphs before the actual anecdote or metaphor.
You're probably the only author that gets them to read at all.