Chapter 6 - The Interview Process

Interviewing is a process. In the investigative project, one question leads to more questions and one interview leads to another interview. No one interview will yield all the information you need, so knowing how to connect with many people is important. To do that, reporters must understand that people are three-dimensional. Reporters must genuinely care about the story they investigate and demonstrate their sincere interest in the information a person has to offer. Care and interest result from doing background research about the topic you will talk about (which is step one in getting good interviews). You must be able to listen to people’s answers and follow up with more questions. It also helps over the course of a long project to develop a system for scheduling your interviews. Methods of interviewing will vary depending on what type of information you seek and how much information you need from a particular source. As you gather your information from interviews, you need to develop a system for storing and organizing your notes, which will help later as you analyze and write the story.

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Exercises

Try out mini interviews

  1. Throughout the day turn every encounter into a mini interview.
    1. Ask each person you meet their name, where they are from, what they do for a living or what they hope to do for a living, and what they love to do most when they are not at work or school. Then see how much more information you can learn through these casual interviews: where they grew up, whether they are married or single, whether they have children or pets, their religion, politics or favorite movies, and so on.
    2. Get their business card if they have one, or find out if they are on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or some other social networking site where they can be reached.
    3. Create a spreadsheet and enter the names and contact information and other information you collected about them.
  2. Pick someone who has an occupation or interest that might make for a good story. Call him or her up and ask if you can follow him or her around for a morning or afternoon. When you do follow that person, take notes as if you intend to make that person’s actions the narrative thread in your story. Look for the scene that will open up the story and for scenes that provide telling details about the person.
  3. In your library or through a Web search, find an article that profiles a prominent person. Magazines to look through include Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Esquire or Rolling Stone. How did the author of the article bring the person to life? What anecdotes can you spot? What telling details did the author include? What questions do you think the author had to ask to get the anecdotes and telling details?

Big Story Steps

Starting and organizing the interview process

  1. 6.1 From the information you got from your initial interviews, combined with the information you got from your preliminary research, map out a schedule for your next interviews according to the 5Ws System or the Inductive Approach as outlined in this chapter.
  2. 6.2 Create a spreadsheet for your interview notes. Make columns for the name of the person you interviewed, the questions you ask, the answers they give, the major points the answer suggests, questions raised, and To Do.
  3. 6.3 Anchor the information in the “Answers” column by creating a hyperlink and ScreenTip.
  4. 6.4 Enter the notes from interviews you have completed so far into the spreadsheet. Each time you complete new interviews, enter the notes into the spreadsheet.
  5. 6.5 Sort your spreadsheet by the To Do column and add those tasks to your To Do list.