Talk:Conducting a good interview
Contents
Overview
Always check your recording equipment before the interview. Check your batteries. Make sure everything is working properly before you begin.
For phone interviews, a land line is preferred (cell phones can drop calls) but cell phone is OK.
Always introduce yourself and mention that you're with KDHX in St. Louis.
The key to a good interview is preparation. Listen to the artist's music, as much as you can. Forty-five minutes with Google will give you lots of great topics. Come prepared with questions written down. Refer to those questions during the interview, but don't just read them off like a list.
The best interviews are like an intelligent, witty, enjoyable conversation. If you sound interested and excited about the topic, your subject will respond in kind.
The standard length for a Q&A interview is 20-25 minutes. If the subject is really engaging or significant, an interview may go longer.
Questions
The nature of your questions will be guided by the nature of the assignment or the subject. Try to tailor your questions to specifics about the artist's music, career and recent news. Try to avoid being too general, but if you are interviewing a musician, here are some basic starters:
- Can you talk about the recording process for the latest album?
- What was it like to work with X as a producer?
- Some critics have pointed out X about your music. What’s your view?
- How did you get started playing piano/guitar/banjo or writing songs?
- You have a unique approach to songwriting/singing/playing. How has that changed over time?
- Tell me what inspired that song.
- You’ve had some interesting collaborations with X and Y. Talk about working with X or Y.
Avoid yes or no questions. Questions about influences can be effective, but avoid general questions about influences. If you know the artist has a surprising influence or experience, ask a specific question about that.
If interviewee mentions a name and you have some doubts about how it might be spelled or believe you may find it hard to Google later, ask him or her to spell it out for you.
If you must ask the most obvious of questions – “How is the tour going?” – use that question to set up a follow up: What's the strangest show you've had? What were the audiences like in Europe? How do you manage the economic realities of touring? Etc.
Most of all, it is important to listen. Instead of jumping back to your list of question, listen to your interviewee, and think on behalf of the audience. Ask the next question on their behalf: What would they want to know? What is the logical follow up to the point your interviewee just made?
NPR has compiled advice on interviewing musicians from a large number of radio hosts. Many of the points discussed here relate to radio interviews, but some are also relevant to transcribed interviews. The document presents a variety of perspectives on varying interview styles in varying contexts. Not everything here applies to transcribed interviews.
Transcription
Be gentle and careful in editing the transcription. The goal is to reflect the natural speech and responses of the interviewee. That doesn't mean capturing ums, ahhs, or garbled sentences or phrases, inserting a lot of (Laughs), but rather giving natural and readable speech patterns.
That being said, if an interviewee speaks in an awkward, hard-to-read fashion, frequently using expressions such as "like," "kind of," "sort of," "you know," you may need to edit some of those out for readability.
Main thing is not to distort what the interviewee says. This can be a fine line between including too much of the verbatim transcription or not enough. Use your best judgment, with the goal being faithful expression of meaning and intent. The rule is to transcribe accurately but clearly what a subject says; if you need to make dramatic edits, within sentences or within a single train of thought, insert ... where the edit happens. If you need to insert a word to clarify meaning, use [ ].
Avoid unnecessary ellipses. Do not use to indicate pauses or disjointed thoughts. Use only when deleting significant words from a quotation. Include a space before and after the ellipsis: Bob Dylan said, "The answer ... is blowing in the wind." If the material deleted forms a complete sentence, consider punctuating like this: The songwriter said, "I don't follow rules. ... I hate rules."
That said, you don't want to slice and dice up interviews too much, resulting in dozens of ellipses or insertions. With very minor grammar infractions, or missing words, you may gently edit, but be gentle and don't change the meaning or intent.
If a response is really long, say over 200 words, and there's a natural break in the response -- sort of like a paragraph -- and what comes after that pause or break is non-essential or redundant, you may excise.
In other words, you don't have to include everything the interviewee says; instead, look for natural places to edit, without distorting or leaving out vital responses or contexts.
Furthermore, if you asked a question and the response just didn't go anywhere interesting or you feel like it could be cut, just leave out both the question and the answer completely. Again, so long as the transcription flows and meaning is not distorted, such gentle editing is appropriate. You don't want to overwhelm the reader with marginal, boring or redundant quotation.
Plan to save your recording of the interview for at least six months.
Formating
After you have transcribed, follow the format of Q&A interviews published already. 100-300 word intro, then Q&A:
And, as always, ask your editor if you have any questions!
