(With the weather continually failing to cooperate with my desire to pull the Mustang out of storage, I decided to pine for “Betsy” openly with a throwback post to 2017. It’s a good reminder that the point of interviewing is to gain information that is important, to not overthink your interviews and that some day soon, summer is coming. — VFF)
(The subject of a four-word interview.)
I stopped off to get gas this morning when a man in his 70s approached me.
“What year?” he asked, pointing to the Mustang.
“’68.” I told him.
He nodded. “Nice.” He then got in his truck and drove away.
In the simplest of terms, this was a perfect interview and the whole thing took four words.
In all the reporting and writing classes I have taught, the biggest problem students tell me they have is interviewing. They don’t know what to ask or how to ask it. They feel awkward talking to other people or they get the sense that they’re being pests. They would rather just email people and hope for answers instead of approaching people in public and talking to them. This is why interviewing features prominently in both the Dynamics of Media Writing and the Dynamics of News Reporting & Writing.
Interviewing is a skill and like any skill, you need to practice it to become better at it. That said, it is important to understand that every day, you conduct dozens of interviews, so you are probably better at it than you think you are. You ask your roommates how their day went, you ask the waitress what the special of the day is and you ask your professor, “Will this be on the test?” If you don’t think of these interactions as interviews, it’s because you are overthinking the concept of interviewing.
The purpose of an interview is to ask someone who knows something that you need to know for the information you seek. When you get that information, you do something with it. The guy at the gas station wanted to know one thing: What year Mustang was I driving? He figured the best source was me, the owner of the car. He asked a question that would elicit the answer he sought. He got his information and he moved on.
Interviewing as a journalist can seem much more complicated than that, mainly because you have to do a lot of preparation, you need to troll for quotes and you need to figure out how the answers fit in the broader context of your story. That’s all true, but if you start with the basic premise of “What do I need to know?” your interviews can feel more natural and less forced.