Over the Edge + March 16, 2011 opinion 5 Interviewing How to conduct interviews PAUL STRICKLAND CONTRIBUTOR Journalistic interviews with subjects for news stories are rarely exciting, but there can be exceptions. One recalls the early 1980s German film Das Boot, in which a visiting journalist is interviewing the crew of a U-boat just returned to port after completing a mission. Seconds later RAF planes arrive to strafe the port, killing many members of the crew and narrowly missing the journalist. | once interviewed emergency personnel at a big fire at a brick plant near the main Canadian Pacific line through Medicine Hat. The flames were quite close to propane and other fuel cars on the tracks, and there was some danger they might blow up. | also interviewed front-line police and then neighbours during a hostage-taking incident in an inner-city neighbourhood. Sometimes | was within range of the suspect’s rifle. Most interviews are not conducted in such dangerous circumstances. | was never a war correspondent, although | did cover live-fire artillery exercises by British Army Training Unit Suffield forces on the open southeastern Alberta prairie provided by the host Canadian Forces Base Suffield. | would interview BATUS officers and soldiers. The British officers liked the landscape because it was supposed to approximate conditions in Libya, and it was good to be prepared in case hostilities ever broke out there. | also covered Canadian Forces exercises there, and once | was invited to try firing a sub-machine gun. Fellow reporters at The News called me “Rambo Strickland” for a while after that. Then there are embarrassing interviews. Once | was interviewing the administrator of a rural municipality near Medicine Hat. We never got along all that well, and | was asking some tough questions. Then my pen ran out of ink, and | had to ask him if | could borrow a pen from him in order to complete the interview. (I didn’t trust my 1970s tape recorder because it tended to stop at unexpected times. | would get back to the office and find out | didn’t have a recording of a key interview | needed for a story. In addition, editors at any newspaper often frown on the length of time it takes to transcribe from a tape-recorded interview. It’s often better to develop one’s own system of speedwriting and take really fast notes.) Guidelines for conducting good interviews might include the following: 1. Ask the kinds of questions that require specific, detailed answers, not ones that will allow the interviewee to respond with simply “yes” or “no”. 2. Avoid asking double-clause questions that tend to require the interviewee to respond to two essentially different questions. Otherwise the interviewee will answer just one of the two questions, usually the easier one. Try to keep to one issue per questions with as simple a grammatical structure as possible. 3. You can sometimes use extended pauses to get the interviewee to offer more information. Bikes vs. Cars Winter in Prince George CIARAN OLSEN CONTRIBUTOR | recently came back from an exchange in Sweden in which | lived in student accommodation 3 km away from school. In the fall when there was no snow on the ground and it was easy to get around 4. Avoid questions that imply the reporter will go to print with a story that may make the interviewee look bad if the interviewee doesn’t answer the questions. This could be interpreted as threatening. 5. Don’t report what a person such as a public figure may tell you informally in a grocery-store line or during casual conversation while, say, signing your passport-application form. This would be unfair. Call the person Monday at their office, say that what they told you in the grocery store over the weekend sounded interesting and ask them if they care to repeat and elaborate on the subject for the record. 6. If aperson doesn’t want their name used or doesn’t want to be quoted, ask if you can use the information for deep background without attribution, or if it’s all right to check out the information through other sources that may be willing to go on the record. 7. Sometimes, even though you have identified yourself as a journalist working on an article, a person, after a twenty-minute interesting interview, will affect surprise and exclaim, “You aren’t going to quote me, are you?” Use your discretion. If it’s a seasoned public figure that should know better, and you haven't concealed your status as a reporter, feel free to use the information from the interview. If the interviewee is unsophisticated about the media, such as a new city hall secretary or a very young civil servant, for example, who could get in serious trouble for speaking out to the media, just consider the lost time a hazard of the job and maybe try to find completely unrelated sources for the information. The biggest problem with conducting interviews for newspapers or broadcast outlets nowadays is that more and more officials are retreating behind e-mail and refusing personal or telephone interviews. They tend now to insist that questions be presented only by e-mail. Typically a reporter will send an official a series of questions by e-mail around 9:30am. The reporter will wait for hours and then they will get a terse, incomplete answer around 4:30pm, a half-hour before deadline. There’s no time for follow-up questions and no opportunity for obtaining new information that might come from the give-and-take and even the synergy that might arise from an in-person interview. Government, seemingly serving global corporations rather than the people, is getting more and more remote from the average citizen, and the corporate entities themselves retreat farther and farther into the cyber sphere to avoid meaningful contact with ordinary customers. Maybe the interview, at least the journalistic interview, will become a thing of the past. UBC DAP The gateway to accounting ONLINE SOURCE on bike, but come winter and it snowed, getting around was more difficult. My friends in Sweden said they were going to bike all year round, | laughed it off thinking maybe in Germany where it doesn’t snow much but it’s going to be -30 here with snow and it'll be impossible. Sure enough when it hit - 30 most people at the student accommodations were still biking everywhere because the bus was $4 one way and slow. At first | refused to bike as | thought it was ridiculous and dangerous. But after a few trips of walking to school on my own | got sick of it and decided | would give biking in the snow a shot. Actually getting out there with the bike, a scarf wrapped around my face, long johns and double layered gloves on it wasn’t that bad and was actually sort of fun. It was surprisingly easy to control the bike through the snow and it saved a lot of time. Upon my return back to our awesome city of Prince George almost no students here are biking to school and either we are bussing it or driving to campus. It makes me question whether having my car is justifiable anymore knowing that biking is possible and we have a free bus pass. The benefits of biking to school or where ever you are going is that it is cheaper, you get exercise, your outside, it’s a challenge and you’re not hurting the environment. The benefits of having a car are that it is quicker, you can have passengers, it is more comfortable and it’s a status thing to have a car in PG (let’s be honest). Now | know it might not work to bike up and down the university hill in the snow because of safety reasons, but what about when going around town, maybe we should try to make more of an effort to get out there on are bike? After all we are the Green University. The bus is obviously another environmentally and financially friendly option but if you are like me | hate the bus because you have to wait around for it, it takes forever to get where you’re going, and | hate sitting around! Plus if you rely solely on the bus to get around you better plan on staying home on Sunday! What do you think? Respond back to this article if you have an opinion you want to share. Accelerate your future with the Diploma in Accounting Program (DAP) at the University of British Columbia. DAP prepares university graduates with limited or no training in accounting for entry into a professional accounting designation (CA, CGA, CMA or CPA In the US). 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