Interviewing

Training for Interviewing

There are multiple types of journalism-style interviews, including the following:

• Personality profiles
• Casual interviews
• Hard news interviews
• On-the-spot interviews
• Investigative interviews
• Telephone, email, or other remote types of interviews
• Oral histories

Each of these interview styles requires different preparation and may necessitate different approaches. For example, an oral history interview may require the interviewer to carry on a conversation with the interviewee with no particular information gathering goal in mind other than to gain a life story, while a hard news interview may take 10–20 minutes with the interviewer asking the interviewee for specific information and facts. For all of these interviews, however, there is a basic skill set that journalistic interviewers need to master. Those skills include the following:

• Research and preparation, including learning the background of the source and topic
• Listening actively and responding and encouraging the interviewee appropriately
• Asking appropriate open-ended questions and following up on topics with further questions
• The ability to establish a relationship with the interviewee
• Knowing the pitfalls of allowing a source to go “off the record” and how to respond if a source requests to be anonymous or off the record
• Fact-checking information after the interview to double-check that sources provided correct and verifiable information.

Many of the foundations of good interviewing have not changed as technology has changed. For example, ethical journalists are expected to state their affiliation with a news organization and the purposes of the interview for the interviewee when requesting an interview. The purposes of the interview are often restated at the beginning of the interview just to make sure that the interviewer and the interviewee have a basis for anticipating what questions and topics may be covered during the interview. However, most journalism interviewers do not provide interviewees with a set of questions prior to the interview for many reasons, including that interviews evolve based on how interviewees respond to questions and topics. [Page 867]Interviewers generally have a basic set of topics they want to cover or a few questions they want to start with, and when covering hard topics, they may also have a list of soft topics to intermix with the tougher topics and questions to keep the interviewee engaged and challenged.

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