Top Tips: How to handle an interview

When you interview someone you might be more nervous than the person you interview. Here’s some tips for setting yourself at ease so you can get great info.

In News Decoder’s Top Tips, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s Top Tip, News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner offers advice for handling a news interview. 

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Reporting and interviewing are a little bit different from research you might do for a school assignment. Instead of finding information from a book or the Internet, you get information by talking to people.

It might be someone who lives in a neighborhood or who works at a store or at a manufacturing plant in your area. It might be a professor or a politician or or someone high up. The important thing is that the person has specialized knowledge to share.

You don’t want to waste time interviewing people who aren’t experts. But just because someone has a title and lots of education doesn’t mean that they are an expert. 

You can find experts through basic research — reports, news stories and social media. You can find experts by tapping your personal networks — you have friends and family and neighbors and teachers and mentors. And they have friends and family and co-workers and customers and mentors. That ends up being a lot of people who know people.

How to act

When you reach them be polite and respectful. If you can do that you’ve got a secret superpower in a world where so may people are rude.

Being polite stands out. And so you want to be very clear who you are from the very beginning. You want to say: “Hi, I am a student at [whatever school you go to]” and that will immediately get their attention.

You can conduct interviews in person, by phone or via video chat. Regardless, you will want to record the conversation so make sure you ask for permission to do so. It is against the law in many places to record someone without their knowledge.

But what questions to ask?

A great thing about journalism is that you are not expected to actually know anything. You are in the business of finding stuff out, not knowing it to begin with. But you still want to be prepared. Before any interview you should do basic research about the topic and the person you are interviewing so that you will be able to ask questions that will get you good answers.

Don’t stick to your prepared questions.

In the interview you want to get information — facts, data, dates. But you also want good quotes to bring your story to life. To get good quotes, sometimes it is useful to ask questions even though you know the answer because you want the information in the story to come from someone other than yourself. Remember, you aren’t the expert.

And even when you think you know the answer to a question, you might be surprised when the person you interview tells you something different.

So you ask a question. Now we come to the most difficult part of the interview. You have to shut up and let the person talk. And make sure you listen to what they say. Don’t go thinking about your next question or what you will do when the interview is over. Pay attention to what the person says.

Your next question will come off of what they just told you. Each answer to a question spurs a new question. Only when that line of questions is exhausted do you ask the next question on your list of questions.

Sometimes you never get to all the questions you had written down beforehand. And that’s okay. In following up with new questions you get a better interview because you are telling the person that you are really listening to them. And in a world where no one listens to each other, that is a powerful experience.

Ask questions that will yield good answers.

When asking questions try to avoid any that can be answered yes or no. It is difficult to write a compelling article when all your quotes are yes or no. Instead, ask open-ended questions. The best ones are quite simple: Why? How? Why did that happen? How did you feel? How did that work? Why did you do that?

Drill down. When someone says something ask for specifics. When did that happen exactly? Where was that? Who else was there? No detail is too small. You might want to know what someone was wearing at the time, what type of car they were driving, what the weather was like. That’s because you want to take your readers and listeners there.

You want to recreate scenes and you can’t do that without little details. Was it a big office? What kind of hotel was it? How were people around you reacting? How dangerous was that neighborhood?

Anecdotes bring articles to life. They are little stories about something that happened to someone. But people don’t offer them up without prompting. There are questions that can do this: Can you remember the first time you did that? Can you remember the scariest time? Questions like those can jog their memory. They’ll say, “There was this one time that …”

All the time, write down what they say, even if it is being recorded.

Take good notes.

You might end up with an hour of recording and when you play it back you won’t remember what parts were really interesting. But during the interview you will find that your ear works together with your brain and your hand and you end up writing down the most interesting parts and skipping where the person is just thinking out loud.

And if you aren’t recording write down as much as you can. Because you must never trust your memory for information. If it isn’t on a recording or in your notepad you shouldn’t use it.

⇒More on how to take notes.

You might remember that someone said something that isn’t in your notepad. When that happens you contact the person again. It actually gives you the opportunity do so, and here’s the thing: The second time you talk to someone you almost always get better information.

They now have a better sense of what you want and their brain has been thinking about it ever since they first talked to you.

That’s why it is super important to find out how you can easily reach them after the interview. They will want to know how they are going to be quoted and they will be nervous that perhaps you got something wrong. So they will likely want you to be able to reach them before you publish or before your podcast drops.

Treat people the way you would want to be treated.

Ultimately, you will end up with a good interview — one that provides good information and good quotes — if you follow two basic rules:

Be honest. If the person says something you disagree with, don’t pretend you agree. If you are honest about your opinion you are giving the person the opportunity to try to convince you otherwise.

Second, try not to pressure people to answer questions they aren’t capable of answering. Someone who is an expert on finance might not be the right person to ask about the politics of a situation. Someone who is fearful of an industrial plant in their neighborhood might not be the right person to ask about costs or safety standards.

Start with the assumption that the person you are talking to wants to help you. Your job is to help them do that.

If you treat each person you interview with respect, you will not only get a good interview, you will likely get a source who will help you out on future stories.

Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.