Interviewing to find stories
After talking informally to at least 10 people for class Sept. 4, your assignment for Sept. 11 is to continue interviewing — albeit a bit more formally — a diverse cross-section of unfamiliar students and others on campus and post at least one “grabber” sound bite out of the five recorded interviews you perform as initial research into a possible idea for a story of interest to the campus community. Talk to ordinary people (not officials) whom you don’t normally talk to — no friends, relatives or people you live with. Be sure to get their full names, correctly spelled, and other identifying information like age, major, year in school and hometown.
Ask questions that will reveal engaging, story-telling answers. If you need some ideas, check out what last year's class did with the Fresh I web publication.
Record each interview with a digital recorder, cell phone or laptop. Choose a quiet location. Put the recording device near the interviewer and don’t interrupt as he or she speaks. Craft questions that are designed to elicit emotional storytelling, not just simple factual answers. These guides to interviewing may be helpful to review before you start:
- BBC Academy
- Columbia Journalism School
- Media Helping Media
- Poynter Institute
- More from Poynter
- General tips from Spark.com
- Specific tips for technical beats
Pick the best of your five, edit it down as described below, and upload it using the same form on this page that you use to record your attendance. We’ll play a few of the interviews in class after you post them to this site.
Remember that this is a preliminary inquiry only. We’re doing this to see how stories might develop and to critique our interviewing styles. After we’ve done these five interviews, we’ll decide how to proceed toward completing an actual story as part of our discussions next week. Right now, we’re looking for at least one interview that indicates the story is worth pursuing.
The topic you choose can be what you discussed in class Sept. 4 or something else. Don’t get too focused too early. Just inquire about what’s going on in a particular area or general topic without having a specific idea for a story until after you glean the information you get from your interviews.
HOW TO EDIT AUDIO
COMPARING OUR JUDGMENT
For discussion Sept. 11 we'll look at the tabulated results of our news judgment questions to see how well you did predicting what readers of a particular publication found most interesting this summer.
Keeping all these lessons in mind, for Sept. 18 we'll tackle our first writing assignment and then discuss how to find the most newsworthy elements out of a collection of facts and write them in a compelling way.