The interview: giving to get - story interviews

You don't have to tip your hand, but dropping a little inside information into a story interview is a good way to get your subject to open up.

To do serious interviewing, you have to be both a good listener and a good talker--and have the wit to know when to be which. Good listening is a sine qua non and an art in itself. The role of good talking, less often addressed, is what I will deal with here.

As will be clear, though, good talking and good listening are highly interdependent. If you don't listen well, sooner or later you won't be talking about the right things. And if you don't talk well, sooner or later there won't be anything worth listening to.

To talk well to an interviewee, obviously, you must ask the right questions. To do that, you need to prepare for the interview, and one result may be a list of questions. But if you're truly prepared, and if you listen carefully, you will eventually improvise. The responses to your improvised questions may be the most valuable ones you get.

You also need to frame each question, prepared or improvised, with precision. Only if you do so can you be reasonably sure that the answer you get is to the question you think you asked. Because precision is hard to muster on the fly, you may want to ask key questions more than one way until you get them right.

But drawing relevant responses from a source requires an effort by you that goes well beyond intellectual preparation, flexibility and precision. Consider these two points:

Context: Your source must understand the context of each question you ask. You may be able to provide that context as you go along, as in, "Your company's earnings have declined for six straight quarters ... " To keep your questions brief and clear, though, it is often better to take a few minutes to set up a context first--say, a summary of what you think you know about the company's recent performance--rather than load down each question with its own context.

Verification: You must understand not just what the interviewee said, but what he really meant to say. So, you should verify your comprehension of the answers to questions that are critical to your story. You may not wish to halt your source in midstream to do this. But at some point, you ought to paraphrase--not merely repeat--his or her statement and ask whether your understanding is correct.

Such verification is an intellectual order of magnitude beyond checking a quote. The act of paraphrase forces you to think about, not merely regurgitate, what was said. You may get only a grunt of assent. But sometimes your thoughtful playback will stimulate your source and start a more analytical, more rewarding discussion.

For a simple Q&A, these points--context, and questions and verification--may define your role as a talker. For an in-depth story, however, there's a lot more to do. You may be looking mainly for background, and not so much for one person's views. But in either case, you will get less from rat-a-tat question and answerx than you will from a skillfully guided conversation.

Your first task is to set the level of that conversation. The time to do that is when you set the context--and honesty pays. Don't pretend to be more knowledgeable than you are. If you need education in the topic, say so up front. Your ego may suffer, but that's better than coping with input you don't comprehend. Most people you talk to will be pleased to educate you--and at least a little bit exasperated if they catch you faking knowledge that you don't have. Conversely, if you do have some knowledge of the topic, you can get a lot further in an hour's time if you make that clear when you set the context and in your questions. Yes, you may want, for tactical reasons, to hide some of your knowledge of facts--to "play dumb." But do use the topic's specialized vocabulary that you know. That will let both of you save precious time.

'Be hard on yourself and keep your ego at bay.'

And that's time you can use to dig down another layer or two. There's another plus. Your source is comfortable with his specialized vocabulary. By letting him or her use it, you remove some of the tension that often inhibits a source when confronted with a journalist who seems to be a blank slate.

Any story that's worth an in-depth effort is certain to be burdened by complexity. You want to signal your source that you have enough background to deal intellectually with such complexity. He or she then is more likely to initiate a trip below the surface that you may not know is called for.

There's a side benefit to appearing ready to deal with complexity. Most issues that are controversial are perforce complex, even if--like protecting the environment--they once seemed much simpler. A source may be unhelpfully reticent if he knows or suspects that you and/or your magazine are not in sympathy with his views on an issue. He may be more forthcoming if he senses that he can drag you below the surface, where his position may be persuasive.

There are at least three other reasons to pursue a conversation rather than a rigidly organized interview:

To establish rapport: The knowledge and intelligence you reveal are key. But it helps if you show that you recognize in your interviewee not just a source, but a human being--say, one who may be feeling the aftereffects of a "red-eye" flight, or someone who is distracted by the construction noise outside his office. And it requires that you reveal yourself as a human being, too--perhaps one who just lost your floppy disk or who has to get back for a daughter's wedding.

It's easier to talk human to human than source to reporter. And the confidence needed to go "off the record" is more likely to develop when your source begins to appreciate you as a fellow human being and not solely as a wily and perhaps dangerous snoop.

To test ideas: Your story, in the end, will have a framework of ideas. Possibly you already know all of those ideas. More likely, you are still synthesizing them as you report. In either case, you ought to test each key idea by playing it off your sources as you go along. Almost always, you'll get responses early on that cause you to modify your ideas. And if not, at least you'll gain confidence in your ideas and will be able to write a stronger story.

To "pay" for the help: If a source is part of your beat or important to a continuing story, you want to ensure future access. No doubt the best way is to handle his input responsibly and write a good story. But you can also pay for a source's time right away by telling him or her some of what you have learned--without violating confidentiality, of course. The nature of journalism being what it is, chances are that you know a lot that could benefit your source. Perhaps an extreme example: I was once able to surprise a scientist working on a materials bonding problem with the news that one of his colleagues on a different floor in the same research institution was tackling the same problem in a different way.

Furthermore, some of those ideas that you put on the table during the interview are probably right. And one or two may be entirely new to someone who is more narrowly focused--and perhaps less rewarded for idea synthesis--than you are. It's a good omen when you thank your interviewee and he says, as an aerospace executive once said to me, "I learned as much as you did."

All these pluses for being a good talker come with a big potential minus. You can easily talk too much--especially if you happen to be a pretty good talker. Be hard on yourself and keep your ego at bay. The main purpose of your talking is to elicit talk worth listening to. When you do elicit worthwhile talk, be sure to shut up and listen.

John Campbell is a magazine editorial consultant. He has been editorial director, Hearst Business Publishing Group, and is a former senior editor of Business Week.

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