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Conducting Interviews
Conducting Interviews
Talking to people is at the heart of good reporting, but it can pose special
challenges in social issue beats. Whether the subject is religion, education,
poverty, prisons, ethnic conflict, health care or environmental problems, your
stories will succeed or fail depending upon the people you find to populate
them—and whether the tales and information they are willing to disclose to you
are compelling.
Readers and viewers want to learn about someone they can relate to. Without
revealing personal accounts, stories about social issues remain flat and lifeless.
It is your job not only to find those people but also to elicit from them material
that will keep your audience’s attention. Remember that even if your interview
subjects are not experts in the academic sense, they are the experts when it
comes to their own lives.
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