Things We Learned: Our Second (and failed!) Interview

In order to learn more about interviewing, we took a field trip to the local radio station, WPAX/WTUF. It's been on the air since 1922! It was a great opportunity, and we may have even gotten a Humans of Thomasville interview, except...

My phone battery died.

1) Charge your battery. 

We spoke with Chris Hurst about his interviewing techniques.

2) Learn their name.

It's terrible to get all the way through an interview and go to report and then realize you don't know the person's name. Learning their name is important, even if you don't report the name, in order to identify the person should they withdraw permission to use the interview and to make them feel more comfortable during the conversation.

3) Answer the 5 Ws.

This primarily applies to news stories, but learning who, what, where, when, why, and how can help you come up with follow questions during your interview. If you are missing one of those, you can develop a question related to it.

4) Ask the person what their story is. 

When you are finished interviewing, it's important to ask the subject if they want to tell you anything else. Most people have a story bursting within them--they simply want to be asked. So ask! What story do you want to tell me? Anything else you want to say? Is there anything you want me to know?

Things We Learned: Our First Interview

While taking pictures for our profile picture, we met Mr. Gibbs. I know him personally, so it was a great first interview.

Here's what I learned:

1) Take a lot of pictures.

I ended up with three good comments from the interview, but I only had one picture.

2) Compose the picture well.

I felt nervous and rushed, so I didn't take my time to compose the picture. I think that I missed out capturing the city life behind him because of the angel.

3) Slow down.

I had all the children with me, so I felt I needed to  move quickly. This left me dissatisfied. I want to allow time in the future to really talk to people and allow them to govern the conversation more. I felt that I pushed for answers a bit too much.

4) Consider recording the interview. 

I need to think more about this one. While I was able to remember what we talked about, I can see how it will be difficult to remember exact words when we interview multiple people or have long conversations. Need to think on this one.