The basis for almost all great journalism is the interview, the act of obtaining information from a source. With less in-person meetings and more phone interviews, Zoom meetings or other online interviews happening during the COVID-19 pandemic, the same effective interview skills apply.
These skills can easily be implemented in this new environment to heighten the depth of information obtained from sources and to help reporters write more authoritative and complete articles.
Bart Pfankuch is the content director for South Dakota News Watch, a non-profit online journalism group. Contact him at bart.pfankuch@sdnewswatch.org.
It sounds simple enough, right? Find someone with knowledge, call or visit them virtually, ask them questions and record their responses. But like everything in journalism, conducting quality interviews is a craft that requires great commitment, effort and skill to pull off at the highest level. It demands a never-ending process of learning and improving.
Interviews serve several important purposes. They deepen a reporter’s understanding of a topic; they provide opportunities to gather detail, color and specifics that enhance storytelling opportunities; they add context, nuance and perspective that documents and data cannot provide; and, ultimately, they generate credibility with readers by strengthening the writer’s voice, authority and understanding of a topic.
Effective interviewing is an art form; there is no one way to do it well and the approach depends on the subject and the topic. Here are some tips to conducting memorable and effective interviews that will generate quality material to make your reporting and writing shine.
— Consider the Three Ps. Preparation, planning and persistence are critical. Great interviews only result from great preparation. Read up on sources and topics before the interview begins. Never go in cold.
— Be ready for anything; don’t let sources take control of the interview. Ask a tough question three different ways if that’s what it takes to get a real answer.
— Be patient to get more info. Asking good questions takes skill. Thought, anticipation and analysis are critical elements of asking the right question at the right time. Do not be in a hurry.
— Discomfort is encouraged on both sides of interviews that become intense and go deep; it’s OK if you both squirm a bit.
— Think about questions in advance and write them down. On breaking news, think on your feet and react to the situation to come up with high-impact questions. Maintain a tight focus on the work and don’t drift off.
— Ask open-ended questions and those that push the source to go beyond the obvious and make them think deeply and reveal things they may not have intended to. Force them to reveal their feelings in addition to their knowledge.
— Develop a connection with the subject and use a conversational style to lower their guard and make them feel more comfortable revealing the truth. Be open with the source to gain trust and credibility and build a rapport but not a friendship.
— Create a flow for the interview that makes sense and feels right. Easy questions early, hard questions in the middle, follow-up queries at the end. Plan a strategy in advance.
— Listen more than you talk. Avoid questions with long wind-ups. Give the source your full attention at all times.
— Try to meet sources on their own turf (when this is safe). Better yet, be with them when they undertake an activity or go about their daily duties.
— Use the “devil’s advocate” excuse to pose sensitive questions.
— Share a bit of yourself to warm up an uncomfortable, uneasy or inexperienced source.
— Feel free to acknowledge that you don’t know something or didn’t get it. Ask sources to explain complex topics in the simplest terms possible.
— Always seek opportunities for photos and video. In this new environment ask the subject if they can submit photos or video or is it ok to do screen shots during your video call. Do the full interview, then re-ask a good question while taking a photo or short video.
— On breaking news, interview both the blowhards and the quiet people who stand on the edge of a scene. Find the highest ranking officer on the scene and question them. Never stop asking questions of authorities until they walk away or tell you to stop. Have business cards handy to give to people and ask them to call you later. Act and think fast because opportunities are fleeting. Stay a little longer than you think necessary.
— In press conferences, never ask your best question amid the pack. Try to get private time with the source or call them later with the gangbuster inquiry. Always break away from the pack.
— Be kind and respectful at all times and don’t be afraid to use tasteful humor to break down barriers with an uncomfortable or new source.
— Record interviews for accuracy, even if transcription takes more time and is painful. For phone interviews, put your phone on speaker and tape the call on a micro-recorder. When a key fact or great quote comes along, write down the time on the recorder in your notes to expedite finding it later.
— Always keep open the opportunity for a follow-up interview. Arrange to speak again to clarify facts or run new findings by them. Get the cell phone number of all people you interview.
— Put the phone down and turn the radio off while driving after an interview (windshield time is thinking time.) Right after an interview, go back and tidy up the notes and write up the information in story form.
— Practice makes one proficient; becoming a student of the interview process and reviewing past results leads to constant improvement.
Our First Amendment rights must survive COVID-19
Can the government override our First Amendment rights with orders such as limits on public assemblies, faith-based gatherings and public protests during the COVID-19 pandemic?
The short answer is “yes … probably … in certain circumstances … within specific limits.”
Here’s what our public officials, should ask themselves — and what we should demand that they do — before using public health concerns as a reason to infringe on any of our core freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly or petition.
gpolicinski@freedomforum.org, or follow him on Twitter at @genefac.
First, take a measure of whether a quarantine, stay-at-home order or limit on public gatherings is in response to an actual crisis.
Little doubt today’s COVID-19 pandemic meets that test.
But going all the way back to 1900, courts have not always supported declarations. In that year, a federal court overturned a San Francisco quarantine order applied to a largely Chinese-American area of the city. The court, in Jew Ho v. Williamson, found the order overly broad, based on a biased and unsupported theory that rice consumption made people more likely to spread bubonic plague — a genuine health crisis of that moment.
More recently, several courts have rejected such government overreach in cases involving vaccination for measles — overturning attempts to ban unvaccinated students from attending public schools. Again, in other cases more than a century old to modern-day issues ranging from AIDS to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of a few years ago to concern about Ebola, courts largely have focused more on “how” government is applying limits on personal freedoms rather than “if” such action is constitutional.
In what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cites as the foundation case for government authority to impose public safety limitations, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 1905 Massachusetts’ state power to impose “public health control measures” in the face of a smallpox outbreak. The justices held that the 10th Amendment empowers states to undertake “reasonable regulations” to protect public health and safety” and cited a community’s “right of self-defense” to “protect itself against an epidemic disease.”
But both First Amendment and due process requirements of the 14th Amendment lead us to the second question that public officials should ask themselves: Is the order the least-restrictive means to protecting public health?
We see such reasoning applied when officials have turned first to “social distancing” — 6-, 8- or 10-foot separation from others — or limits on the number of people at public gatherings, rather than attempting outright bans on all meetings or short-term school closings before canceling classes for an entire semester.
As a coalition of free-speech groups — including, I should note, the Freedom Forum — argued in an open letter recently to federal, state and local officials, there also are ways to protest that don’t violate health orders: “Wearing masks and standing 6 feet apart outside hospitals and other places of business to protest inadequate safety precautions; participating in car demonstrations in Arizona, California and Michigan; and launching digital campaigns.”
The letter was promoted in part by a tweet on April 14 by police in Raleigh, N.C., that public protest is “a non-essential activity.” The coalition letter argued that “people must be free to express disagreement with government decisions, even when it involves criticism of essential public health measures.”
Two lawsuits directly stemming from COVID-19 restrictions give a hint as to the legal battles ahead.
Temple Baptist Church in Greenville, Miss., filed a federal lawsuit challenging $500 fines for worshipers who attended a “drive-in” service in which they remained in their cars. The U.S. Justice Department is supporting the church, saying police targeted a religious gathering and were not applying meeting limits equally to secular events, and that a ban on attending services in a car does not meet the “least-restrictive methods” test.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld last week that Gov. Tom Wolf’s March 19 order banning “non-life-essential” meetings does not violate the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble or other constitutional rights. A group supporting a congressional candidate had challenged the executive order, claiming multiple constitutional violations, including that it interfered with members’ rights to peaceably assemble at a “place of physical operations” that they wish to use to engage in speech and advocacy.
However, the justices, in Friends of Danny DeVito, et al v. Wolf, said, “Constitutional rights to free speech and assembly … are not absolute, and states may place content-neutral time, place and manner restrictions on speech and assembly,” as long as the restrictions further a substantial governmental interest and do not unreasonably limit alternative means of communication, such as online campaigning.
Technology may be a barrier to successful challenges by faith-based communities to orders preventing them from gathering to worship, which some groups argue is essential to their religious practices. Courts may find that online meeting apps and software, such as Zoom and GoToMeeting, provide reasonable alternatives to actual gatherings, at least for a short time. Critics of social distancing or meeting bans may counter that not all people have access to the web, but not everyone has ready transportation to attend services in person, either.
And the element of time introduces a third question to be asked, likely to come more into play as the coronavirus crisis lengthens: “Is the duration of the limit appropriate to the danger?” As the danger to public health ebbs, the legal justification for preventing in-person worship services or shoulder-to-shoulder protest marches also will diminish.
For those watching the daily briefings from the White House, federal officials are, for now, limited in their power to impose widespread orders like stay-at-home restrictions. The U.S. government can impose individual quarantines to prevent the spread of diseases like cholera, yellow fever, pandemic flu and now “severe acute respiratory syndromes” like COVID-19 across state lines. But as with state and local officials, federal agencies like the CDC show a clear and compelling reason for detention — that it’s the least restrictive measure required to protect public health.