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PART TWO: REPORTING TOOLS
CHAPTER 3 Interviewing
Overview
The importance of interviewing cannot be overstated. It is the crux of the news-gathering
operation. What often differentiates the good reporter from the average one is not only the
ability to ask the right questions but also the knowledge of how to ask them.
In this chapter, students will learn how to prepare for an interview and several ways to
Teaching Tips
You should emphasize to students that there is no one correct way to conduct interviews. The
methods they use depend on the person being interviewed, the type of information sought and
the time they have to get it. There is a difference between interviewing someone about an
Students can learn about techniques by reading this chapter and the related readings, but
they cannot really learn how to interview unless they actually do it. That is why it is
important to assign as much interviewing as time will permit. If circumstances do not allow
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Lecture Notes
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Interviewing defined Mike McGraw of The Kansas City Star as a case study.
B. Two kinds of sources:
C. TV, broadcast, webcast?
II. PREPARING FOR THE INTERVIEW
A. Background.
B. The news story.
1. Minimal time for background/preparation, but review what your research has
revealed.
2. Plan approach whom to seek out, alternative information required (check
equipment).
C. The profile.
D. The investigative piece.
1. Often adversarial
III. DOING AN AUDIO OR VIDEO INTERVIEW
C. Sound bites words and video that convey emotion and information.
D. New set of interviewing tools (Al Tompkins, Poynter):
1. Ask subjective and objective questions.
IV. USING THE TELEPHONE, EMAIL, INSTANT MESSAGING OR SKYPE FOR
INTERVIEWS
A. In person is best, but when necessary to interview by phone, remember three points:
2. Explain the purpose and importance.
3. Help interviewee relax.
B. Email interviews have lots of weaknesses.
1. No rapport.
2. Not certain who is actually sending the email.
C. But email is quick and convenient, preserves questions and responses.
V. SETTING UP THE INTERVIEW
A. Clothing, appearance can matter.
B.
VI. PREPARING QUESTIONS
A. Researching questions.
1. Ask other staff members, find ideas in electronic database, get advice from other
sources.
B. Phrasing questions slight changes matter!
1. Watch out for leading questions, betraying reporter bias seek to be neutral.
2. One question at a time.
3. Be empathetic with embarrassing or awkward questions.
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1. Work from the general to the specific.
D. Closed-ended questions used to pin down details, to be specific.
1. Vague questions will beget vague answers.
VII. ESTABLISHING RAPPORT
A. The reporter-source relationship involves trust, so have a plan and have the honesty
C. Interview approaches:
1. Put the subject at ease small talk, humor, etc.
2. Go where the subject is comfortable.
D. Other practical considerations:
1. Where and how you sit.
2. How you takes notes keep recorder inconspicuous; develop a note-taking system.
VIII. ENSURING ACCURACY AND FAIRNESS
A. Using a recorder.
1. Ensures absolute accuracy.
2. Turn it on in plain sight; explain only if there are questions or concerns from the
source.
3. Putting device on a stable surface helps eliminate transient noise.
B. Taking notes.
1. Anecdotes about a bad interview by a student intern, and about David Finkel, a
C. Verifying information.
1. Do post-interview research.
D. Observing.
1. Use all your senses, not just your hearing Wright Thompson anecdote.
E. Asking follow-up questions.
1. Be alert! Pay attention!
2. Three helpful follow-up questions: What did you mean by that? How do you know
F. Other techniques.
1. Delaying tactics when falling behind in an interview.
3. Pause sources will tend to react by adding more to their responses.
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IX. ENDING THE INTERVIEW
B. Review the basics name spellings, titles, facts/figures, etc.
C. Tell source when story might appear.
Class Activities and Discussion Questions
Activity 1: someone the
student knows well. Randomly pair students, and tell them they will be interviewing one
another for a profile story. Give students 15 to 20 minutes to conduct the interview, and then
have the pair switch roles. Circulate throughout the classroom during the interviews, and note
specific positives and concerns about the interview process. The point of the activity is to get
students to focus on the interview process, not necessarily to write a story from the interview.
Discussion questions: What made the interview successful? What was a struggle? How was
Activity 2: Have students interview you for a profile story. You might provide a quick bio
sheet beforehand for background. Tell students the interview will follow the format of a press
conference and that they must take detailed notes. Vary the way you respond to questions; for
example, your responses can range from simple yes or no answers without any elaboration to
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Activity 3: Role-play a newsworthy figure from your community, and have students
Discussion questions for activities 2 and 3: What would the story be about? How do you find
a story focus after an interview? What questions were most effective? Most ineffective? How
hostile?
Activity 4: Invite a pair of newspaper or broadcast reporters to speak to the class about their
approach to interviewing. Give the reporters the opportunity to describe the most-successful
Activity 5: Bring in a guest speaker to be interviewed. The speaker can be a professor in
another discipline or someone outside the university. As preparation, consider providing a
quick bio for your students. Allow students to conduct a group interview. If possible, ask the
speaker, especially if he or she has been interviewed by professional journalists, to evaluate
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Activity 6: Show students a segment of 60 Minutes that features an in-depth interview with a
source. As stu -up
interview with the source. After the interview concludes, have students share their questions,
and have other students cross off questions that they also came up with. Keep going until all
Solutions to Textbook Exercises
1. Team project. The purpose of having the class see what each team produced is to
demonstrate the range of issues that could be explored. It also gives you an opportunity to
evaluate, as a class, the effectiveness of the open- and closed-ended questions. Students
recommend you ask students to cite the source of their material and to give you an
electronic version of their sources. This way, you can check for accuracy. Emphasize that
they need to evaluate the sources they find on the Internet and use the most reliable ones.
librarian to meet with the class to talk about how to conduct a database search (as opposed
to a simple Google search). If you do not have database access, try taking your students to
the library or to the offices of the local newspaper to conduct the searches.
3. In this exercise, students should be both the interviewer and, more important, the
interviewee. The experience of being interviewed is an essential part of your class. Few
reporters have ever been interviewed. It is important that all journalists learn what it is
like to be on the other end of the questions. They should experience the helplessness of
not being in control of the interview, of not choosing what gets in and what does not, and
they should see how many mistakes both of fact and of context are made by the
reporter. This gives students more respect for the problems involved in interviewing. For
this exercise, encourage students to interview broadly only long enough to be able to zero
4. Your journalism blog. Again, most journalism students have not been the subject of
stories, and they need to have the experience of being a source. Asking students to read
5. This exercise gives you an opportunity to get your students out of your classroom and into
the university community. For many students, walking up to perfect strangers and asking
Solutions to Workbook Exercises
1. Perhaps the best program for interviewing techniques is 60 Minutes, but it might be
helpful to also show some clips from local news programming that feature less-effective
2. In our experience, journalism students can be somewhat introverted, and many are
intimidated by the idea of interviewing people especially adults older than they are. This
is a just-for-fun exercise that gives students some practice in developing open-ended
3. An Internet search will turn up information about most newsmakers, but remind students
that journalists often interview other journalists and people in the community to acquire
background for an important interview. The memo should test the same elements the
inverted pyramid does: The student must select those things pertinent to the assignment.
Feel free to change the focus of any of the exercises. Make them as timely as possible.
4. Point out to students that a reporter who has evidence of embezzlement would draw the
noose tighter with the closed-ended questions and would eventually present the evidence,
a. Open-ended questions:
1. This is a big operation. How do you keep track of the finances of this agency?
2. If someone in this agency were embezzling money, how would the system catch
him or her?
3. Would you talk about the responsibilities you have in your role as administrator of
this agency?
b. Closed-ended questions:
1. Is your salary commensurate with your responsibilities?
2. What fringe benefits do you get?
3. Are the de facto rules governing checks written to you any different from those for
the other employees?
5. Students should write questions that go from the general to the specific. The reporter is
searching for a focus. As soon as that focus is identified, then the questions should
probably be mostly closed-ended. A sample series of questions follows.
a. Which of your accomplishments do you think were most important in your winning the
scholarship?
e. What are your career goals?
f. What will you study abroad?
g. How will this year as a Rhodes Scholar help you achieve your career goals?
h. What advice do you have for others who may be thinking of applying for this
scholarship?
6. a. The point here is that almost without exception, there will be no rapport established on
camera. There is too little time. Usually, the on- t even see
b. Students will probably know or can find out something about a person who appeared
on a national news show. They can base their answers on background gathered from
7. First, the interviewer should gather background information. In addition to biographical
material, he or she should talk to other students to find out what the instructor is like in
8.
established rapport this way because of information I ob
9. Answers will vary. Be sure to collect both the original and the corrected versions.
10. You might have the students choose a story with multiple sources and have them call or
send questionnaires to each of the sources. Or you could choose stories from the local
daily. Either way, the purpose is to get students to talk to sources and to see if students
11. In effect, students are asking the journalist to give them a couple of anecdotes. Besides
12. We urge you to set a high standard of accuracy for the class; tell students that a quote is
not accurate unless all the words are the same and in the correct order. The AP Stylebook
permits the reporter to correct grammatical errors if they are occasional a slip of the
tongue. If there is a news conference on television, have your students cover it. Compare
13. This exercise aims to impress on students how difficult it is to be accurate. Too many
reporters we send into the profession have the idea that they are accurate when they are
not. Reporters need to see how many mistakes they make. Then, perhaps, they will work
14. The CNN Money website allows students to pick any of hundreds of schools. The figures
are for the previous year, so you may have more up-to-date information about your own
school. The students should get some good story angles by comparing the numbers. Why
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15.
sentence fragments that turned up as full quotes or if there are sentences with words left
out that the reporter filled in later, then the editor should suspect that the reporter may not
CHALLENGE EXERCISE
16. Students can emphasize several different story angles. Which one the writer chooses
depends on the news values of the publication and what is currently of public interest. The
following version assumes that the four problem areas are of equal importance. In a real
situation, any one of the four may be worth emphasizing. For instance, if the university
In an interview one week after resigning as chancellor of Springfield University,
Barbara Behling said she had corrected four major problem areas during her eight
years in office.
Behling, attracted from Oklahoma by a search committee indicating the Springfield
campus was ready for change, identified the four areas as the university hospital, the
disrepair of the campus, the structure of the campus administration and minority
recruitment.
The hospital was the major problem.
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Soon after she arrived, she received a proposal to build an addition to the law
school. The questions she asked, she said, made her realize how much planning had to
be done before the physical plant could be improved.
She ordered good documentation on campus maintenance and then began long-term
planning. Now, about $145 million worth of construction has been completed or is in
progress on projects that came out of the long-range plan.
If this structure were continued, the story would go on to report her work on the two
remaining problem areas in the same order in which they were introduced. From the
lot to learn in a short