I’ve unintentionally put this blog on hiatus since the big run up to Christmas break, but I’m going to attempt to give this equal priority with all the other projects I have this semester.
In that light, this first post back is related to interviews I’ve just conducted for a magazine article I’m writing…
Mind if I ask you a few questions?
Reading about interviewing is one thing; conducting them is another beast entirely.
Dear God is interviewing a hit-or-miss proposition. For the hour-long interviews I had today, I think there were some mixed results. Both started off about the same topic, but ended up going in separate directions. Both were with science journalists. Both were seeking information on a topic I knew little to nothing about.
Of course that’s the reason anyone conducts interviews: to seek out the information you don’t know about from someone who is an expert on the subject.
Even in setting up the interviews, I ended up with different results. I definitely confirmed that e-mail is a medium where tone is everything, and was attempting to be very polite and formal as I did so only to run into a gamut tones from prospective interviewees (not just the two who graciously agreed to be interviewed).
The first interview subject came across as terse in the e-mail but was completely amiable and congenial during the interview. I was nervous about it, but it ran smoothly and I don’t think I came across as completely incompetent (as is my greatest fear). I’d done some research on the topic and thought about the kind of questions I’d wanted to ask which definitely helped shape the interview, so I thought I had a handle on what to ask for the second one.
Riding high off that success, I took a bit of a mental break before the second one. Perhaps that was a mistake, even though this subject same across as more approachable in their e-mails.
This one went much differently than the first. I’m not sure if it was my generalized questions, or if I was expecting to cover some of the same ground as the first, but this one netted a very different set of responses than I was prepared for. In fact, I was a bit lost as to where I was going by the end. Part of that was the sheer volume of the replies, but some of it had to be an uncertainty as to where this was all going to fit into my article.
Maybe I should have spaced the interviews out further – taken more time to think about how the information applied to my topic, maybe I should have taken different approaches to the interviews themselves, or it may have been the fact that I was conducting them over the phone.
Interviewing is so much more than just asking questions and listening to the replies. And it looks like the only way to be comfortable with it is to conduct more of them.
Practice makes perfect as they say; I only wish that analyzing the result could be done by more than the interviewer and the subject. Things can seem both better and worse in hindsight.
