Basic Interviewing Principles

1) Understand the subject matter that the interview will cover

2) Dress appropriately for the setting and person you are interviewing

3) Have integrity; be honest with the purpose of the interview

4) Keep the purpose of the interview in the forefront of your mind

5) Follow the directions provided

6) Keep your opinions to yourself

7) Take a conversational tone, encourage free and open responses

8) Make every effort to obtain answers to all questions and probe for further detail if necessary

9) Be respectful, practice patience and tact

10) Be sensitive to cultural nuances

11) Pay attention to accuracy and detail

12) Exhibit a real interest in the inquiry, practice good listening skills

13) Keep control of the interview, make every effort to keep your schedule

14) Review your questions before ending the interview. You may want to say something like, “Now let’s
see if we’ve got everything,” to allow you to do so

15) Show your appreciation by thanking the interviewee when you are finished

16) Complete your notes, provide as much detail as you can, and check for accuracy

17) Respect tAdvance Work

 
Fred Zimmerman, a long-time reporter for The
Wall Street Journal, has these suggestions about how to
prepare for an interview:
 
1. Do research on the interview topic and the
person to be interviewed, not only so you can ask the
right questions and understand the answers, but also so
you can demonstrate to the interviewee that you have
taken the time to understand the subject and also that
you cannot easily be fooled.
 2, Devise a tentative theme for your story. A
major purpose of the interview will be to obtain quotes,
anecdotes and other evidence to support that theme.
3. List question topics in advance ¾ as many as
you can think of, even though you may not ask all of
them and almost certainly will ask others that you do not
list.
4. In preparing for interviews on sensitive
subjects, theorize about what the person's attitude is
likely to be toward you and the subject you are asking
about, What is his or her role in the event? Whose side is
he or she on? What kinds of answers can you logically
expect to your key questions? Based on this theorizing,
develop a plan of attack that you think might mesh with
the person's probable attitude and get through his or her
probable defenses.
 
 
 
Give and Take The early stage of the interview is a feeling-out period.
The interviewee balances his or her gains and losses from divulging information
the reporter seeks, and the reporter tries to show the source the rewards the source
will receive through disclosure of the information-publicity, respect and the
feeling that goes with doing a good turn.
When the source concludes that the risks outweigh the possible gains
and decides to provide little or no information or is misleading, the reporter has
several alternatives. At one extreme, the reporter can try to cajole the source into a
complete account through flattery-or by appearing surprised. At the other
extreme, the reporter can demand information. If the source is a public official,
such demands are legitimate because officials are responsible to the public. The
reporter can tell the source that the story-and there will be some kind of story-will
point out that the official refused to answer questions. Usually, the source will fall
into line.
A public official cannot evade a question with a plea of ignorance. A
city controller, whose job it is to audit the financial records of city agencies and
departments, told a reporter he had no idea whether a bureau had put excess funds
in noninterest-bearing bank accounts. Told by the reporter it was his business to
know that and that the story would state so, the controller supplied the
information.
 
The Questions
 
Careful preparation leads the interviewer to a few themes for the inter-
view, and these, in turn, suggest questions to be asked. But before the specific
questions are put to the interviewee, a few housekeeping details usually are at-
tended to, vital data questions. For some interviews, these may involve age,
education, jobs held, family information. For well-known people, the questions
may be about their latest activities.
Questions of this sort are nonthreatening and help make for a relaxed
interview atmosphere. Also, they are sometimes necessary because of conflicting
material in the files, such as discrepancies in age or education.
People want to know these details. Harold Ross, the brilliant and
eccentric former newspaperman who founded and edited The New Yorker, slashed
exasperatedly at the pages of profiles and interviews that lacked vital data. “Who
he?” Ross would scrawl across such manuscripts.
Even the obvious questions about background can result in fascinating
and revealing answers. For a personality profile, the interviewer asked Whoopi
Goldberg why she adopted Goldberg as her stage name. She replied:
“It was my mother's idea. It's a name from the family past. There are lots
of names hangin' on our family tree, Jewish, Catholic, Asian . . . Black folks,
white folks. I'm just the all-American mutt.”
Simple question. Fascinating quotation.
 
Direct Questions Most questions flow from what the reporter perceives to
be the theme of the assignment. A fatal accident: Automatically, the reporter
knows that he or she must find out who died and how and where the death
occurred. The same process is used in the more complicated interview.
A reporter is told to interview an actor who had been out of work for
two years and is now in a hit musical. The reporter decides that the theme of the
story will be the changes the actor has made in his life. He asks the actor if he has
moved from his tenement walk-up, has made any large personal purchases and
how his family feels about his being away most nights. These three questions
induce the actor to talk at length.
Another reporter is to interview a well-known entertainer. The reporter
decides to ask about the singer's experiences that led him to write songs that call
attention to war, poverty, sexism and racism. “Bread,” says the singer in answer
to the first question the reporter asks. “Money,” he explains. There is a good
market in such songs. The reporter then quickly shifts themes and asks questions
about the economics of popular music and the singer's personal beliefs.
 
Open- and Closed-Ended Questions When the sportswriter asked the
hurdler, “What do you think of our town?” he was using what is known as an
open-ended question, which could have been answered in general terms. The
sports editor's suggestion that the reporter ask the athlete about the condition of
the track would have elicited a specific response-fast, slow, or slick-as it was a
closed-ended question.
The open-ended question does not require a specific answer. The closed-
ended question calls for a brief, pointed reply. Applied properly, both have their
merits. Two months before the budget is submitted, a city hall reporter may ask
the city manager what she thinks of the city's general financial situation-an
open-ended question. The reply may cover the failure of anticipated revenues to
meet expectations, unusually high increases in construction costs, higher interest
rates and other factors that have caused trouble for the city. Then the reporter may
ask a closed-ended question, “Will we need a tax increase?”
As we have seen, reporters often begin their interviews with open-ended
questions, which allow the source to relax. Then the closed-ended questions are
asked, which may seem threatening if asked at the outset of the interview.
Television and radio interviews usually end with a closed-ended
question because the interviewer wants to sum up the situation with a brief reply.
The reporter who asks only open-ended questions should be aware of
their possible implications. To some sources, the open-ended question is the mark
of an inadequately prepared reporter who is fishing for a story.
Some television reporters tend to ask open-ended questions, even when
a specific one is more appropriate. A Chicago TV reporter in an interview with
orphans asked a youngster, “Do you wish you had a mother and father?” The
most familiar of all these open-ended questions asked by poorly prepared TV
reporters is, “How do you feel about . . . ?”
Good questions are the result of solid preparation, and this requires more
than reading the local newspaper and chatting with authorities. Reporters who
hold to these narrow confines usually operate only in a linear fashion. That is,
today; s coverage is built on yesterday's newspaper stories and the council
meeting of the day before. Good stories-informative journalism-are spurred by the
questions that break the chain of events. Remember Copernicus. All he asked was
what would happen if the sun and not the earth were the center of the universe,
and centuries of linear thinking shot off onto a new plane.
 
Tough Questions Sometimes a young reporter finds that posing the
right question is difficult because the question might embarrass or offend the
interviewee. There is no recourse but to ask.
Oriana Fallaci, an Italian journalist famous for her interviews, says that
her success may be the result of asking the world leaders she interviews questions
that other reporters do not ask.
“Some reporters are courageous only when they write, when they are
alone with their typewriters, not when they face the person in power. They never
put a question like this, 'Sir, since you are a dictator, we all know you are corrupt.
In what measure are you corrupt? “
Remarkably, heads of state, kings and guerrilla leaders open up to
Fallaci. One reason for this is her presumption that the public is entitled to
answers and her unwillingness to be treated with indifference. When the
heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali belched in answer to one of her
questions, she threw the microphone of her tape recorder in his face.
Another reason for her effectiveness is “her talent for intimacy,” as one
journalist put it. “She easily establishes an atmosphere of confidence and
closeness and creates the impression that she would tell you anything.
Consequently, you feel safe, or almost safe, to do the same with her,” writes
Diana Loercher in The Christian Science Monitor.
 
 Kissinger the Cowboy In her interview with Henry Kissinger, the U.S.
secretary of state at the time, Fallaci had him admit that his position of power
made him feel like the “lone cowboy who leads the wagon train alone on his
horse.” His image of himself as the Lone Ranger caused an embarrassed
Kissinger to say later that granting Fallaci the interview was the “stupidest” act in
his life.
A political reporter who accompanied Sen. Don Nickles on a tour of
Oklahoma towns noticed an apparent inconsistency in Nickles' public statements.
Nickles often described himself as a conservative who was tough on federal
spending. Yet in Eufaula, Nickles announced “good news” from Washington, a
commitment of federal funds for a new housing project.
The reporter then asked if the Republican senator's approach was
consistent-condemning government spending in one place and welcoming it in
another. Nickles' answer: He would vote against federal housing funds but as long
as they were available, “I will try to see that Oklahoma gets its fair share.”
The quote ends the story, and the reader is left to decide whether the
senator is an opportunist.
Some reporters gain a reputation for asking tough questions and not
wasting time on preliminaries. When Jack Anderson, the Washington columnist
whose specialty is exposés, calls a congressman, the politician knows that he is
unlikely to be asked for the text of a speech he is to give in Dubuque. Anderson is
after meatier game.
 
Intrusive Questions Still, there are questions that few reporters like to
ask. Most of these concern the private lives of sources-the mental retardation of a
couple's son, the fatal illness of a baseball player. Some questions are necessary,
some not. The guidelines for relevance and good taste are constantly shifting, and
reporters may find they are increasingly being told to ask questions that they
consider intrusive. This is the age of intimacy.
Reporters who dislike asking these questions, preferring to spare sources
anguish, are sometimes surprised by the frank replies. A reporter for Newsday was
assigned to follow up on an automobile accident in which a drunken youth
without a driver's license ran a borrowed car into a tree. One of the passengers, a
15-year-old girl, was killed. In doing his follow-up story, the reporter discovered
that most of the parents were willing to talk because, as one parent said, the
lessons learned from the accident might save lives.
 
Junk Questions Wendell Rawls Jr., a veteran newsman, describes his
interviewing technique:
 
Don't tell people what you know. Ask
questions. Then back off. Use diversion. I love to do that
¾ talk with people about things you're not there to talk to
them about. You ask a question that may be very
meaningful. Then you move away from it. I do it
sometimes even if the person doesn't get particularly
 fidgety, because I don't want him to think that I think
what he has told me is necessarily important to me. I'll
move to another question and say, “What is that on the
wall? That's an interesting sort of. . . .” Whatever.
Anything that will divert him, and he will start talking
about that. And then maybe ask two or three questions
about junk, and then come back and ask another very
pointed question.
 
Listening, Watching
 
“Great reporters are great listeners,” says Carl Bernstein of the
Woodward-Bemstein reporting team that exposed the Watergate cover-up that led
to President Nixon's resignation.
The good listener hears good quotes, revealing slips of the tongue, the
dialect and diction of the source that sets him or her apart.
In an interview with Luis Manuel Delgado whom Diana Griego Erwin
encounters at a motor vehicle office in Santa Ana, Calif., she finds Delgado
unable to tell the English-speaking clerks what he needs. Does that bother him?
Erwin asks. Here is an excerpt of their conversation from The Orange County
Register:
 
“I should know how to speak English,” he said with a
quiet simplicity. “This is the United States.”
“My kids are very good,” he said. “They get good marks in school. They speak English. No accent. One
wants to be a doctor. When they first came here I told them to study English and learn it well. Don't let
them treat you like a donkey like they treat your papa.”
I asked him if it didn't hurt, being treated “como un
burro,” as he said.
“No, I am not a donkey and my children know it.
They know I do all this for them.
“They are proud of me. Nothing anyone else says or
does can make me sad when they have pride in me.
“And they will never be donkeys.”
 
Sometimes, a single quote can capture the person or illuminate the
situation the interview is about. In an interview with a former governor of
Arkansas, Sid McMath, a single quotation told a great deal. First, the background.
 
School Desegregation In 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus defied a federal
court order to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School. Although President
Eisenhower responded by ordering the 101st Airborne to enforce the court order,
Faubus had legitimized resistance and there was mayhem when the few black
students tried to enter the high school.
Faubus was a small-time politico when McMath plucked him out of
Madison County.
 After the Little Rock spectacle, McMath was asked about Faubus and he
replied: “The sorriest thing I ever did as governor was to build a paved road into
Madison County so Orval Faubus could come down it.”
 
School Cruelty Listen to Wendy Williams, a bright 13-year-old, talk to
a reporter. She lives in a trailer park in Dixon, Ill. Her teacher recommended her
for an advanced math class, but she said no. “I get picked on for my clothes and
for living in a trailer park,” she said. “I don't want to get picked on for being a
nerd.”
 
he interviewee’s right to confidentiality