Conducting Interviews

My story about John Ku and Music for Minors ran today. Great guy, great story, check it out here…

Today was pretty quiet in the office, but I did get a fair amount of work done including, but not limited to, editing, redrafting, writing and interviewing.

Interviewing.

Hmmmm.

The quintessential way that we get information and quotes for stories.

Discuss.

I conducted three interviews for my developing work on poster art at particle accelerator labs for Symmetry magazine. Two of them were via the telephone due to geographic limitations and the other was in person just a few hundred feet away. The difference was astounding.

It may be easier to type an interview as you wedge the phone between your head and shoulder, but live interviews, even those that require a quick pen, are infinitely better. You get a sense of the person, see what the office is like, what sort of gizmos are on the desk, what is on the computer screen when you arrive. You get eye contact and body language. You get descriptions with hands and a description of the person. It's more relaxed and flows better.

So I would like to contend once and for all, that the only way to be a good journalist (or PR writer) is to get out of your office and meet people on their grounds and take in information with ever sense available and not just your ears. I've had teachers and mentors tell me this for years, and I always believed them, but it is something else entirely to experience first hand.

Video conferences are better, but still aren't quite the same. I don't believe technology will ever catch up to actually being somewhere.