Posts Tagged ‘interviewing’
How to interview an expert: throw away your canned questions, ask for stories
I was a reporter for many years, and I have to confess I wasn’t the best. I was a far better writer than nearly all of my colleagues, but the goal of journalism is news - and for all my pretty words I wasn’t hard-nosed or streetwise enough to get the best and toughest stories. I was a decent feature writer and a decent depth reporter - but even there, no more than decent. And one of the reasons for this was that I was not as good at interviewing as I should have been.
My faults as an interviewer were not mine alone; many reporters have them. One was talking too much, filling in the silences rather than letting them stretch out to see what the other person would finally say. The other was asking too many leading questions.
