Interviewing

As a reporter you will be interviewing people every day and this ranges from casual phone conversations to formal interviews arranged weeks in advance.

Interviewing is not rocket science and the most important part of it is having the social skills to make the conversation as natural as possible and using your natural inquisitiveness.

On the phone or face-to-face?

It is always better to interview someone face-to-face. It gives you a chance to develop a rapport and it is much easier to communicate with someone when you can see each other's body language. Almost always, you will get a better interview if you are face-to-face with a person.

But face-to-face interviews also take more time because they can often mean travelling and waiting around. With resources stretched increasingly thin in the local press, this can be a real problem and the reality is that you will often have to do interviews over the phone simply because you do not have the time to meet with the person.

This obviously depends on your newspaper. There are some where you can still do plenty of face-to-face interviews, but at others you will be so busy you will hardly ever be able to get out of the office.

But no matter how busy you are, you should always meet with people when they are paying tribute to someone who has died and you should also be getting semi-regular interviews with local chief executives and council leaders. As well as giving better stories, they also help build good working relationships with them.

Shorthand or Dictaphone

When interviewing, you have to decide whether you use shorthand or a Dictaphone and there is no consensus about this.

The advantage of shorthand is that it takes less time to transcribe and people can sometimes feel uncomfortable with a tape machine and therefore be less likely to say something interesting.

But if it is a longer interview then having it on tape can mean that you can establish a better rapport with the subject. You can make more eye contact if you are not constantly looking down at your notepad and it can feel more like a natural conversation.

It’s worth trying both and see which works best for you. If you do prefer Dictaphones, then always make sure you check and double-check your equipment. There is no shortage of stories about journalists coming out of fantastic interviews only to find that nothing has recorded. I once heard about a celebrity interviewer who flew to Los Angeles for an interview. On arriving back in England, she realised that she had not recorded anything and had to do the whole thing again on the phone.

Whichever you decide, it is still important you can do shorthand to at least 100 words a minute.

For one thing, there is an attitude in many newsrooms that someone who cannot do shorthand is not a proper journalist. Besides, there will always be situations when you cannot use recording equipment. If you are reporting a court case, for example, a judge’s summing up can be difficult enough to get down accurately when you have shorthand. It would be next to impossible without it.

Dealing with jargon

For a journalist, there is little as frustrating as someone who talks in jargon. Not only is it difficult to follow, but it also produces quotes that are unusable.

Council officials and people from scientific or computer backgrounds tend to be the worst offenders, but it can crop up in many situations.

The most important thing is never to accept it and to remember that it is the interviewee who is at fault for using jargon, not you for not understanding it. After all, some of the most eminent scientists in the world find it easy to explain their work in simple language, so it can be done.

Keep asking them to explain what they mean and do not be afraid to repeatedly explain that you have to get it in language that the average person in the street would understand. Keep repeating back phrases that are jargon and explain why they are unusable, and keep going until you get the sort of copy you need.

When I was on work experience, I did an interview with a local man who had developed a web-based product and he spoke about it in pure jargon. I did ask him to explain what he meant a few times, but I did not do it enough. After the interview, the chief reporter asked me what the story was about and I had to tell him that I had no idea. Don't let that happen to you.

Asking difficult questions

Aggressive questioning might sound great on TV, but it does not translate very well to the print media. When you are reading a newspaper story, it is difficult to get a sense of how shifty a politician might have been. The only thing likely to come across is that you haven't got good quotes.

This does not mean you have to go easy on them. But it does mean that being friendly is usually the best approach. And the benefit of interviewing for newspapers is that you can keep politely asking the same question until you get a quote that answers the question.

If there is a question you are planning to ask that is likely to offend the interviewee, try to save it to the end. That way, if they are so offended that they end the interview, you still have enough copy to write an article.