Why interview?

The case for building credibility and adding more voices

Not all citizen media producers have interviewing at the top of their to-do list. The reasons vary:

• I'd love to do more interviewing, but I always feel that I'd be pestering people and that they might not want to talk to me.
   
• I don't know how to approach strangers or what questions to ask.
   
• I have a day job and barely have enough time to write/produce my pieces as it is. How could I possibly find the time to do interviews?
   
• Doesn't interviewing get in the way of unmediated voices? I don't want to ask loaded questions or "spin" someone else's words.
   

Interviews are integral to good journalism. They provide more than just additional voices; they provide facts, expertise, balance, depth and credibility. They also breathe life into information that might otherwise fall flat. Interviews:

• Improve your stories (by providing atmosphere and making them more interesting).
   
• Teach you a lot (by providing background).
   
• Build credibility (by giving various stakeholders' points of view).
   
• Make your stories fairer (by providing balance).

The details that jump out of a story (and stick in your mind) are usually the results of an interview. A description of a child's face or the scene at a local soup kitchen or construction site - these pictures, verbal or actual, are what make stories come alive. If you're able, try to capture whole scenes in your notes: sights, sounds and smells as well as the answers to questions that you jot down or record.

If you're doing a telephone interview, be alert to the conversation and don't get sidetracked worrying about your questions. If you listen well, you'll know what to ask, and you'll also collect a lot of detail.

By interviewing, you can get at the background of an event, person or issue, which gives readers a better grasp of the topic. And, by interviewing people who are experts in an area, you can glean facts or gain an understanding that is crucial to telling your story.

This doesn't have to be a big deal. If you're writing about your local lawn contractor's struggle to get visas for his Mexican seasonal workers, you don't need to obtain the contractor's whole life story. But you probably can get from him a great understanding of U.S. immigration and labor laws, as well as the contractor's own, local tale.

Building Credibility

Interviews give your reporting credibility. To be honest brokers, journalists - citizen or professional - have to put their stories in context. In contentious issues with various or opposing stakeholders, this means getting feedback from both, or all, sides. News consumers want to know the lay of the land.

Often this comprehensiveness is achieved over the course of several stories, but try to seek a breadth of comment in an individual story when discussing hot-button issues that arouse high passions.

What to do when your own passions run high on a subject you're covering? Keep them to yourself. Unless you're writing an opinion blog, try to stay neutral. This doesn't mean you must turn into the Zombie Interviewer, but it does mean you should hit the mute button on your own thoughts.

Striving for Fairness and Balance

Fairness and balance are related. Fairness means giving all stakeholders on a subject a voice or an opportunity to air their concerns or viewpoints. Often it involves giving people a chance to respond to assertions or allegations that involve them.

Balance means you make a deliberate effort to be even-handed in your newsgathering and reporting so that you avoid the appearance of taking a side. You can best do this by making sure you reach out to talk to people on all sides of an issues, whether you agree with their points or not. When you round out a story with details or comments, it helps your audience fully appreciate an issue.

Common obstacles

Bruce Koon — an advisory board member for J-Lab's New Voices program, a project to seed community news ventures — puts it this way: "There are three issues: I might not have the training. I might not have the time. I might not have the inclination because that's not how I see myself."

Koon is a citizen-media ambassador of sorts, working to link San Francisco citizen outlets with KQED public radio, where he is the news director. He also gives presentations on citizen media developments at mainstream media conferences. Koon says many of the sites he looks at rely on first-person observations rather than on interviews.

The argument for interviewing, he says, is that it's a way to provide more accurate information and bring more people into the mix.

"There's a facilitating quality to interviewing," Koon says. Sometimes a site is successful in getting a variety of people to contribute or post comments, creating an open discussion. But other times a controversy arises and it's hard to sort out the facts from the rhetoric. It's possible that a pertinent expert will happen upon the site and post a comment to help users put the issue in perspective.

"But if serendipity doesn't allow that," Koon says, "then I should invite someone to the conversation if it's helping to advance or inform."

Also, interviews can serve a range of practical purposes, from simply confirming information to getting background on a topic you're writing about.

Self-expression

Citizen media sites run the gamut, from those that resemble traditional newspapers — like NewCastleNOW.org in Chappaqua, N.Y., which was created to replace a local newspaper that folded — to those with a decidedly more activist bent.

The Eminent Domain, a site that focuses on community development in New York City neighborhoods, comes from a community-organizer ethos, which prizes unmediated voices. Journalistic interviews seem contrary to that worldview, says Alyssa Katz, the site's editor.

"Community organizers see journalism in the context of, 'I am going to be in the background manipulating what someone else tells me,'" she says. "They would rather spend their time staging a demonstration and getting media coverage. Then they have the stage and there's no mediation."

The Internet has evolved as a medium of self-expression, where bloggers, people posting on Facebook or MySpace or those appearing on YouTube videos have direct access to an audience. Traditional interviewing doesn't have that power-to-the-people feel.

Power dynamics

"It's about power relationships," Katz says. "The interviewer-interviewee relationship presumes authority that the interviewer has and the interviewee doesn't."

But a more expansive definition of interviewing, one that goes beyond just journalism, can help community groups bring more voices to the table, she says.

Interviews can also help various stakeholders (some of whom may be shy about commenting) find a way to ensure that their viewpoints are represented in a community discussion, whether about a new condo development or class sizes in the public schools. Video, Q&As, transcripts, aggregations of posted online comments — all cut out the "middleman" and serve the purpose of an interview.

The case for interviewing

 • You owe it to your readers to try to verify information, be fair to those you write about and represent all viewpoints.

 • You probably already are interviewing. Katz says the same community organizers who are reluctant to do traditional journalistic interviews don't hesitate to bring up a conversation with a neighbor to bolster an argument.

 • Interviews don't have to be formal, scheduled affairs with a list of questions. Incorporating the insights you get from doing what you do naturally — discussing issues, soliciting opinions, gauging the pulse of the community — will make your site stronger and more compelling.

 • Interviewing doesn't have to take a lot of time. Just one short quote can add a lot to a story. It could be collected via phone or e-mail, or it could simply be jotted down on a napkin at a meeting over coffee. (Just make sure you let people know you're quoting them.) And, Koon says, "once you get trained and get used to doing it, [interviewing] takes less and less time."

 • Knowledge is power. Most reporters do interviews simply to learn more, not to get quotes. Asking questions of the right people gives you an arsenal of facts and ideas that will make you more confident in writing about a topic.

 • Interviewing doesn't have to involve mediation or rely on traditional power dynamics. It's all in the approach. Vicki Mallonee, Webmaster of GreaterFultonNews.org, says she's always shied away from interviewing, even though she would like to do it. "It's so direct," she says. "It's almost confrontational."

But it doesn't have to be.

Listen to this audio piece on Election Day by Kristofer Ríos of People's Production House, a citizen-media collective in New York City that teaches community members — including young people and immigrants — to produce audio/radio pieces about their communities. It takes the interviewer out of the equation entirely and just allows people's voices be heard. (The subway sounds are also a nice touch.)

The bilingual Reno, Nev.-based NuestroTahoe (OurTahoe) site adopted a novel approach to interviewing: It reversed the traditional question-and-answer format. This piece, in Spanish (scroll down for the English translation), has local residents talking about trash collection. But the answers (Respuestas) come before the question (Pregunta), changing the power dynamic.

 • Interviews can amplify a writer's experience. Take a look at this powerful account of being arrested during the Republican National Convention protests last summer. Written by Sheila Regan of Twin Cities Daily Planet, the story is told mostly in the first person — as it should be.

But additional voices — an anti-war veteran and a mother — give us a sense of why people were protesting, and why others who'd come to the demonstration decided not to join the melee in which Regan ultimately was caught up.

This was the site's most-read story for a week after the convention.

 • Interviewing doesn't have to put people out. "Most people really like getting interviewed, I think," Regan says. "Regular people don't get asked their opinions very often. Nobody ever asks them."

Interviewing can be a service to your community. You empower people by giving them a voice and helping them convey their message.

 • Under an expansive definition of interviewing, you can be an aggregator of voices.

Katz says an Eminent Domain piece that had an especially big impact focused on a battle conducted via posts on a site for Brooklyn brownstone owners. By quoting those posts, Katz made The Eminent Domain's users aware of a debate occurring on a site they didn't usually visit — and generated a lot more comments.

Is this an interview? Maybe not in the conventional sense, but ultimately it's all about more voices being heard and capturing the range of stakeholders on an issue.

Overview

Why interview?

Interview types

Interview tools

Interview ethics

Interview quizzes

Resources

About

The Knight Community News Network is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. J-Lab^TM is an incubator for innovative, participatory news experiments and is a center of American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C. KCNN is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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