The Art of the Interview in Journalism

 Interviewing:

When you interview a source, you have to be chummy and professional, but remember that they are not your customer or the person you are serving.

It generally is in your source’s best interest that they’re talking to you. The source could have something at stake in a number of ways: They could have something to promote (often more the case in soft journalism), they could have a message they want to get out, or they could use the publicity. On the other hand, they might just have time to kill and might find it polite to answer questions. 

If it’s someone with skin in the game, I find it best not to be overt about the transactional nature of this relationship. I can often smell from a mile away that they have an angle, but by not acknowledging it, I’m setting an expectation that I have my own job and it’s the same job I always do.

What if a source backs out?

The only exception is if someone’s the subject of my story where I might be completely screwed if they back out of my story.

To provide some more background, there are (for the purposes of this explanation) two types of sources: The subject of your story and secondary sources. The type of writing I do is largely human interest meaning that I l don’t have a story without the subjects’ cooperation. If, for example, the story is Joe Blow and Joe Blow doesn’t want to be interviewed for a story, then I’m SOL. The best thing to do is ascertain as early as possible if Joe Blow is down so I don’t waste my time. Now if Joe Blow is an exceptional cupboard maker and the story is about cupboard makers, I could potentially just go to someone who’s also a cupboard maker and make the story about them.

There can be complications to this. Once, I did a short pre-interview (letting someone know you’re interested in working with them and getting some initial questions in to ensure they fit the story I’m trying to write; they often come back with a request to clear it by some PR person before they talk back to me) with a mini-golf champion. I got her agreement and the story was approved. I never heard from her again. I once did about 75% of an interview with a rug owner and then when I got back from lunch, he said he was uninterested. I pulled out my hair trying to figure out a way to get back in his good graces.
 
For the most part, I don’t try to say “if you do this, I will promise you that” or latch onto their angles, but I make general overtures of how I would love to tell their story and talk about doing it in a way that will be as unintrusive on their time as possible.

In one case, I interviewed the son of a Salvadorian pupeseria owner in 2018 and there was sensitive material his father didn’t want to share (he was involved with the Civil War). At a certain point, the son capitulated to his dad. I wasn’t going to put the dad’s story in so I knew that the story addressed the dad’s needs and I just worked around the family to get the final pieces of information because various forces (economics, not letting down the editor) made it advantageous to get the article in. After the article was published, the son read it and he was very pleased.

Human Interest verse Hard-Hitting News

Note that I also say human interest, because that is different from hard hitting news. If say Joe Blow was a cupboard maker who was very controversial or affected the public in some other way, I can write a story about Joe Blow without his consent. It’s a free press and I could always write stories about people without their consent but alienating random cupboard makers who are just doing their own thing, isn’t really a good business model for local journalism. Now it’s worth noting that on a couple occasions, I finished articles about people without their consent.

How to Conduct the Interview

The largest thing to keep in mind is time. Your subject is not on the clock to answer questions so it’s sometimes good to let your subject know you’re at the halfway mark or have five or ten minutes left. If you’re on a time crunch and your subject is long-winded, you might even have to do something that might be a little rude in regular conversation which is explain as politely as possible that you don’t mean to be rude but in the interest of the interview, you would like to move the conversation in a different direction. I just let them know up front (and am socially awkward anyway) that this conversation might be different than a regular interview.

You should have a few questions that are important, but it’s best when it’s an unscripted process. I’ve entered interviews with instructions to write about someone with only a vague idea of who they were and why they were important and the subject informs me along the way of what the story is.

I follow my curiosity because I see curiosity as my gift. The interview is data collecting. You’re not sure what you’re looking for, but just ask as much as you can and don’t think too much what the final article is going to look like.

The Kicker: They’ll want to see the piece.

At the very end, there will often be the uncomfortable moment when someone asks if they can see the piece before it goes to publication. The answer is always no. But here’s the thing: You have the upper hand. You already have the answers and you are free to publish it. At that point, you can stop interviewing them and write your story. Remember, you are being chummy, but it is a transaction and they’re asking you to do something that will compromise your job.

At the same time, in most situations with regard to local journalism, you absolutely need to be diplomatic at the very least. Outright hostility is not going to go over well and if you get a complaint, it could even cost you standing or your job. But, again you are in the right here.    

The best thing to do is show them this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-you-cant-review-article-before-goes-print-craig-guillot/

What you can do is read quotes back to the source AT YOUR DISCRETION.

You also should mention that it’s not your final copy that goes into print because it goes through an editor anyway. I once interviewed a local stamp and coin store and the editor made the unusual decision not to have me to correspond with the stamp owner about areas of concern. I called the stamp store owner about it and he got very upset and I explained that my promises that I made to him were contingent upon an editor who had say over me. He got upset and I felt dragged in the middle. A few years later, I passed by his shop and I apologized about the whole thing and told him I didn’t like the situation any better than he did. It was a pleasant reunion. Often times, I play good-cop-bad-cop with my invisible editor as the bad cop if I have to explain rules.

Wrapping Up

You will have tons of information at your hands and then you’ll lay it out at some point in the future. Thank them profusely for their time. Tell them you might need follow-up questions. At this point, you wait until you write your entire story and see where the holes are.  Put blanks in the spaces where you don’t know the answer and put those follow-up questions on top of the text.

That way you only have to bother them once more and not persistently.

Any follow-up questions?

What I'm Watching March Edition: We Need to Tall About Cosby, Home Economics, Mr Mayor, The After Party, Welcome to Flatch

Welcome to Flatch (Fox): It’s a key ingredient in small-town comedies that you have to add a healthy dose of quirk but few shows have been able to find the comic sweet spot in those peculiarities as well as this show. The show uses a mockumentary style that might evoke comparisons to Parks and Recreation but the characters are much less universally relatable. The show’s protagonists are a pair of aimless cousins (likely around age 20) who are the product of a lack of parental supervision, a little bit of suppressed cabin fever, and hyper-active imaginations. Joining them is lovelorn small-town newspaper owner Cheryl Petersen (Aya Cash) who came to Flatch from the big city as the significant other to the town pastor (Seann William Scott) but got dumped at some indeterminate point. Cheryl, forever upbeat but often frightened at the change to small-town life, is an apt audience surrogate (and on a side note, my hero as a small-town journalism admirer). There’s also an uptight town historian, a perverted blind man, and a love interest for Shrub (one of the cousins) who is emotionally catatonic. Very few character beats are wasted on this show.

We Need to Talk About Cosby (Showtime)-W. Kamau Bell does his homework here in this thorough and emotionally moving look at Bill Cosby’s rise to fame as well as the development of the Dr. Jekyll behind one of Black America’s most steadfast role models. Bell has always been a relatively neutral journalistic storyteller and he does his best to treat even-handedly the people who might be accused of enabling Cosby or supporting him past the point of no return. For the most part, the target is Bill Cosby himself and the documentary hammers home pretty well how awful this person’s actions were. Through his monstrous smears against media outlets and academics who covered him unfavorably, the documentary establishes a pattern that gaslighting and its subsequent forms of psychopathy that were a long part of Cosby’s persona. If you didn’t already know, Cosby’s rapes very much went hand-in-hand with gaslighting as he roofied his victims, violated them while unconscious, and then insisted to them that nothing had happened (even those who might have partially awoken or smelled something fishy). Many a brave victim bears their story in a very matter-of-fact way and there’s a lot of resonance in hearing the same story over and over.

The After Party (Apple TV)-Although we like to tell ourselves and our peers that we’re past high school, I suspect the abundance of TV shows about high school with adult audiences is good evidence that we never completely leave those formative years behind. It’s for that part of our identities that “The After Party” hits on the nose so well. Sure, we don’t spend every waking moment thinking about high school by the time we are 15 years out. However, put us in a room with our high school cohort and I have no doubt that there are always unresolved threads — an unexpressed attraction, a latent inferiority complex, a what-if ticket to stardom, a misbegotten grudge — that is rife for drama fifteen years later. That’s essentially where the show places us. And there’s a murder mystery on top of it because why not? That the show could function well enough without a murder to solve, bodes well for how solid the show’s comic infrastructure is. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is a pretty solid blend of random comic talent (Ben Schwartz, Tyia Sinclair, Ilana Glazer, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz among others).

Dropout (Hulu)-The limited series docudrama covers the true story of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes who invented a way to diagnose multiple diseases through blood or something like that, and then cut corner after corner to the point where she went from wide-eyed dreamer to over-stressed manager to someone who could unequivocally be classified as the bad guy.

Played by the always-talented Amanda Seyfried, Holmes is portrayed early on as an overachiever with curious asocial tendencies. She comes off as a social pariah when she insists to her fellow students in a Mandarin immersion program that they speak Chinese like an unpaid dorm RA and she even practices a form of code switching by deepening her voice with her male benefactors. It’s hard not to admire her pluck and her underdog nature as a diminutive woman in a man’s world. It’s equally hard to put a finger on what or who Elizabeth Holmes is but she’s a fascinating enough figure (even for someone like myself who had no knowledge of her real-life counterpart) to try to pick apart.

Then, of course, there’s her inevitable downfall. While the show does a good job of forecasting how her inability to give up would lead Holmes to divorce herself from reality when things go wrong, the demise gets overly long and protracted until the show becomes smart enough in episode six to figure out she’s no longer the most interesting part of the story. That’s when two interns (Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim) start to go All the President’s Men on Elizabeth’s ass and things start heating up again.

Home Economics (ABC)-I’ve previously heralded this show as a worthy successor to “Modern Family” in that it’s sustainable comfort viewing with some nicely contrasting characters working through familiar family sitcom tropes.

I might even posit that there’s a little more meat on the bones of this premise as there’s a subtle classist examination on the lives of the three adult siblings at the center of this story: Oldest sibling Connor is decidedly more wealthy than his two siblings and that dynamic isn’t ignored as the story saunters along.

I also admire the show’s decision to go for a more horizontal than vertical approach with far less emphasis on the kids or grandparents. For all I care, they can switch up the child actors next year and I wouldn’t notice. Take away their bargaining power like Ray Romano’s kids, I say.

Lately, however, some of the plots are getting awfully basic. In the first season, there was a case of two of the adult siblings re-uniting with a girl they both hooked up with in summer camp. That episode had mistaken identities, cross talk, juicy secrets, and most importantly, real stakes.

A recent episode had two siblings bickering over writing a middle school play and a B-plot over whether two of the spouses are being cliquey by not letting one of the siblings in their friend group. In another plot, one of the spouses (who I assumed was Colbie Smothers, but is not which is another minus) wants her kids to be proud of her Mexican heritage and starts emphasizing words with Spanish pronunciations and cooks them guacamole. Sorry, these episodes have almost nothing to offer outside of the mildly pleasant characters. Here’s hoping things turn around.

Mr Mayor (NBC)-It’s good to have an old favorite back. Now that it’s the second season, can we do a little more world-building. I’m having trouble buying that in one of the 15 most populous cities in the world, the government can be run by only about five people (including one who’s semi-literate) and everyone else is just background. Maybe through in Tina Fey favorites like Tituss Burgess as a frazzled city department head, Dean Norris as the Los Angeles County sheriff, or Jon Hamm as a charismatic district attorney?

Oscar's Class of 2021

So many thoughts on the Oscars, but here's a stat list I keep every year: Actors appearing in a BP nominee who've been in three or more BP nominees:

10 Leonardo DiCaprio-Titanic, Gangs of New York, Aviator, Departed, Inception, Django Unchained, Wolf of Wall Street, Revenant, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Don’t Look Up

9 Cate Blanchett-Elizabeth, LOTR 1-3, Aviator, Babel, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Don’t Look Up Nightmare Alley,

8 Meryl Streep-Kramer vs Kramer, Julia, Deer Hunter, Out of Africa, The Hours, The Post, Little Women, Don’t Look Up

6 Bradley Cooper-Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, American Sniper, A Star is Born, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza

6 Jesse Plemons-Bridge of Spies, The Post, Vice, Irishman, Judas and the Black Messiah, Power of the Dog

6 Benedict Cumberbatch-Atonement, War Horse, 12 Years a Slave, Imitation Game, 1917, Power of the Dog

6 Willem Dafoe-Platoon, Mississippi Burning, English Patient, The Aviator, Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightmare Alley

6 Stephen McKinley Henderson-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Lincoln, Manchester by the Sea, Fences, Lady Bird, Dune

5 Judi Dench-Room with a View, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat, Philomena, Belfast

5 Timothee Chalemet – Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Little Women, Dune, Don’t Look Up

5 David Strathairn-LA Confidential, Good Night and Good Luck, Lincoln, Nomadland, Nightmare Alley

5 Sean Penn-Thin Red Line, Milk, Mystic River, Tree of Life, Licorice Pizza

4 Rooney Mara-Social Network, Her, Lion, Nightmare Alley

4 Josh Brolin-No Country for Old Men, Milk, True Grit, Dune

4 Mark Rylance-Bridge of Spies, Dunkirk, Trial of the Chicago 7, Don’t Look Up

4 Jonah Hill-Moneyball, Django Unchained, Wolf of Wall Street, Don’t Look Up

4 Jennifer Lawrence-Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, Don’t Look Up

4 Toni Collette-Sixth Sense, The Hours, Little Miss Sunshine, Nightmare Alley

4 Christine Ebersole-Tootsie, Amadeus, Wolf of Wall Street, Licorice Pizza

3 Jon Bernthal-Wolf of Wall Street, Ford v Ferrarri, King Richard

3 Rita Moreno-West Side Story, The King and I, West Side Story

3 Richard Jenkins-Hannah and Her Sisters, Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley

3 Aunjanue Ellis-Ray, The Help, King Richard

3 Frances Conroy-Aviator, Joker, Power of the Dog

The Dropout (Hulu) review

The limited series docudrama covers the true story of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes who invented a way to diagnose multiple diseases through blood or something like that, and then cut corner after corner to the point where she went from wide-eyed dreamer to over-stressed manager to someone who could unequivocally be classified as the bad guy.

Played by the always-talented Amanda Seyfried, Holmes is portrayed early on as an overachiever with curious asocial tendencies. She comes off as a social pariah when she insists to her fellow students in a Mandarin immersion program that they speak Chinese like an unpaid dorm RA. The message is clear: Friends are secondary to her goals. She even practices a form of code switching by deepening her voice with male funders. It’s hard to put a finger on what or who Elizabeth Holmes is but she’s a fascinating enough figure (even for someone like myself who had no knowledge of her real-life counterpart) to try to pick apart. 

More so, as a plucky underdog with few social friends and a woman with diminutive stature in a man’s world she initially makes for a good underdog as she genuinely wins the respect of accomplished scientists decades her senior (at least at first).

Then, of course, there’s her inevitable downfall. While the show does a good job of forecasting how her inability to give up would lead Holmes to divorce herself from reality when things go wrong, the demise gets overly long and protracted through several episodes. For a number of episodes, the corner-cutting of Elizabeth Holmes seems like the natural course of action: She doesn't want to screw over her employees or investors by having the company fail. At some point, her cycle of short-term patching without seeing the big picture makes her the least interesting part of the story.

Fortunately, new blood in the form of two green recent college graduates (Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim) serving as interns shake things up pretty explosively in the sixth episode. Minnette's character is the product of nepotism whereas Kim comes from poverty and she has too much to lose by being a whistle-blower. The two start out as sleuths resembling a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew (with more bio-technobabble, of course) before turning into Woodward and Bernstein. 

Heading into the final two episodes, there's hope that this series could close out on a high note. 

What I'm Watching February Update

As We See It (Amazon)-The story takes place in the Bay area with three autistic people with wildly different wants of life and situations sharing a house under one roof with the guidance of their ridiculously awesome life coach Mandy (Sosie Bacon). Half the appeal is watching Mandy show understanding, commitment, and love in ways that I’m not even capable of in the presence of other autistic people, and I’m on the upper end of the spectrum myself. The story progresses well and trisects with the three central autistic characters diverging towards different paths of which the other two are only marginally aware of.

As someone who is both on the upper end of the spectrum and spent most of my life either unaware that I was on it or actively denying I had it, I can imagine these desires — impatience at people dumber than you, defining your adolescence by sexual experience, the desire to grow up, how desperately you might need a friend if you don’t get out much — as relatable to anyone. The difference is that an autistic person might have a greater barrier to processing these problems.

It’s also worth noting that outside of “Everything’s Gonna Be OK” (which is really not my cup out of tea outside its autistic character), few shows have had characters that are officially identified with this label. Before we give the two shows I’ve covered so far such big accolades, it’s worth noting that TV has had characters appear on TV who had an amiguous disorder because the writers didn’t dive into the psychology manual and weren’t living in a society that rewarded the breaking of glass ceilings. On “The Big Bang Theory”, for example Jim Parsons didn’t realize that Sheldon was likely a person who had Asperger’s until well into the show’s run. Perhaps there’s something to be said for the way a character like that evolved organically, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Space Force (Netflix)-This was on my top 12 shows of 2020 Honorable Mention list even though it has a non-sensical premise. Even if it did happen in the four upside down years of real life during the last presidency, it’s never not jarring hearing a show about a Space Force. It’s growing on its character beats. The romantic story in the middle between the characters played by Tawny Newsome and Jimmy O. Yang is actually played out well in an inverse of the “will they-won’t they” because the two have already slept together and now they’re trying to figure each other out afterwards. Yes, the show is easy fodder for a punchline because the whole show is based on a throwaway punch line, but that doesn’t mean it can’t eventually make its way to be watchable TV.

At the show’s center, one problem is that General Naird (Steve Carell) isn’t a particularly fertile well for any sort of comic tension or anything else for that matter. He’s slightly stubborn in the way most military leaders are (probably by design of their job) and has the requisite stiff demeanor, and there’s an inkling of an ark where a stubborn man might learn his lesson of listening to others (a la Home Improvement) but Naird is fundamentally a decent guy so the bell curve of his arc is pretty flat.

Running Wilde (NBC in 2010, now playing on Tubi)-Mitch Hurwitz’s follow-up to Arrested Development that brings together AD veterans David Cross and Will Arnett with Keri Russell (pre-Americans, post-Felicity). It’s fascinating for a reassessment because there are glimpses of Hurwitz’s brilliance at winding plots together and exposing characters’ blind sides. This time Hurwitz’s genre of choice is the screwball comedy which is about characters negotiating romantic, gender, and class divides in various factions.

The premise, however, is far less adaptable to sustainable comedy in that the central character idle rich Stephen Wilde (Arnett) devotes a tremendous amount of effort and money to courting a childhood crush who is engaged (to Cross). Throwing all the romantic comedy tropes at the fan still doesn’t justify any of these characters’ efforts (I’m not commenting on anyone’s ethics, I’ll leave that to feminist or anti-feminist reviewers to fight amongst themselves over) though it does help the absurdity of it all that Keri Russell’s daughter (Stephania Owen) narrates the absurdity of it all knowing full well that the three principals of the story are supreme idiots.

Disenchantment (Netflix)-The fourth season is slightly better than Season 3. It made my Honorable Mention list in 2019 and my Top 12 in its debut season.

Doll Face (Hulu)-This charming show about female bonding separates itself a little from the “Sex and the City” template by prioritizing a focus on female bonding over the requisite relationship drama. Its as if the show is aware that it can’t pass the Bechdel Test organically and that’s ok.

What’s more problematic is that the show’s quartet is a little bit distant from a Middle America perspective in that they all have jobs in the quaternary and quinary sectors as influencers and marketers. Sort of millennial faux aristocracy.

Kat Dennings is so charming, in my eyes, that she makes material as hackneyed as the double-entendre-laden drivel of “Two Broke Girls” work and she only gets better as the material becomes decent. Esther Povitsky is a gem as well. She’s half with-it and half helpless dork. The other two members of the quartet are forgettable.

Inventing Anna (Netflix)-A journalist (Anna Chlumsky) who is trying to survive in a sink-or-swim work environment sees a fraudulent heiress on trial (Julia Garner). It might have been better if I didn’t read how it all ends but it gets a lot of mileage out of Julia Garner’s vague European accent and the scenery porn. As a journalist I know what it’s like to have the doubly hard task of getting your sources cooperation and getting your editors on board your story idea. Most people don’t realize that you need both those orbits to align to get your story.