Blogging 101: Conducting interviews for media

A good friend of mine from the FLOSS community is going to be doing some interviews for his blog at an upcoming conference, and asked for a few tips on interviewing. Interviewing is not a science, but an art: And art requires practice.

I don’t claim to be the world’s best interviewer: Most of the interviews I do are your basic information gathering sessions to fill in the gaps for a feature or news piece that I’m writing. If that’s the kind of interview you’re gearing up for, then the primary thing is to make sure you have a set of clear questions that will get the answers you need and to do the interview in whatever way will produce the most clear answers. (I prefer email for this sort of thing.)

But if you’re trying to get the sense of a person, and convey more than some basic stats about them, you need to do a few things:

• Do your homework.
• Do your homework.
• DO YOUR HOMEWORK.

Too many folks show up for interviews with a set of cursory questions and hope that the the interviewee will just magically open up and provide a great interview. If you’re doing an interview that you hope will matter, spend some time researching the person (or persons) you’ll be talking to. Read their previous interviews if you can. Find out what they’re usually asked and what they haven’t been asked.

• Don’t ask the same tired old questions that they’ve been asked before hundreds of times.
• Ask the interviewee what they want to talk about. You shouldn’t be restricted to this, of course, but sometimes you might find out something interesting that no one else has touched on.
• If doing a phone interview or in person: Give the person plenty of time to respond, and don’t jump in to fill every gap in the conversation.
• Have ample time to do the interview. This may not be entirely up to you — if you’re interviewing Mark Shuttleworth around Ubuntu release time, for instance, you’ll probably have 15 minutes and then done. So make the most of it.
• Talk to other people, ask what they would want to know about the interviewee.
• Avoid leading questions. All too often interviewers come into the discussion knowing what story they’d like to write, and customize the questions to fit.
• Practice. If you’ve never done an interview or are just getting started, spend some time interviewing people you know. Write up a set of questions beforehand and do it “officially.” Then look at what you have after the interview and ask yourself how that reflects the person you know. You might find your “stock” questions don’t do enough to find out anything real about your subject.

Finally, put yourself in the interviewee’s seat. One of the best tools to learn about interviewing is to be interviewed. I spent a lot of time doing interviews via email, phone, and in person while with Novell. Most of the interviews were the same question over and over. But a few of the interviewees were actually very on the ball and asked insightful questions and seemed to care about the answers. Those were the interviews that were most enjoyable and produced the best results, in my opinion.

Respect the interviewee’s time, and that of your audience. If you go in with that at top of mind, you should do a great job whether it’s your first interview or one thousandth.