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Yes. But I prefer face-to-face interviews because it’s more natural than talking to someone on the
phone.
Where do you most and least like doing interviews?
I don’t care where they take place. The less formal, the better. My goal is always to make the
interview as much like a conversation as possible.
Do you ever stage scenes?
If you mean suggest that someone do something so that I can observe him doing it, no. I’ll
sometimes ask if he’s going to be doing anything relevant to what I’m writing about—in which case
I’d like to go along—but it has to be something he’d be doing anyway.
Do you take notes or tape your interviews?
I take notes. And in some cases I use a tape recorder. But if I use a tape recorder, I also take notes.
Why both?
Because I don’t want to have to transcribe interviews. If I take notes while I tape, I can consult my
notes to learn where a quote is on the tape. Then I can look it up and get the exact quote.
In what circumstances do you tape?
I’ve taped interviews when I’ve done stories about, say, science, because I know so little about the
subject that I didn’t trust myself to get the information correct in my notes. And I sometimes use a tape
recorder when I know in advance that the person I’m going to interview speaks so rapidly that I’ll
never get it all down in a notebook.
What kinds of notebooks do you use?
I use a little bitty spiral notebook that fits into my shirt pocket. I write phone numbers and names
from one end, and when I flip it around, the pages from the other end are where I write down my
appointments.
I also use a long, skinny reporter’s notebook to take notes during interviews. When I was in the
South, The New York Times Atlanta bureau chief, Claude Sitton, convinced a stationer in Richmond,
Virginia, to design us special reporter’s notebooks, which were shorter than the standard notebooks.
That way, we could put them in our pockets without being instantly identified as a Yankee reporter
who needed to get hit upside of the head with a stick. We called it the “Claude Sitton Memorial
Notebook.” When I have both notebooks and a tape recorder, I feel like a Transit Authority
patrolman: every pocket is stuffed with something.
How confrontational will you become during an interview?