Claudio Sanchez  On Reporting


APPROACHING THE FIRST INTERVIEW: WHAT YOU WON'T LEARN IN A CLASSROOM

When I got here, I learned very quickly — certainly from some of NPR's best writers, because before you're a good reporter, I think you need to be a good writer — ideally at the same time — from people like Alex Chadwick in particular, that in order to get a story across, you need to write about very narrow things. And leading up to the question of how do you interview people when you go out and do a story... I don't think and try and even anticipate with the questions, what that person is gonna say, or how that person is gonna say something. You go there and try and identify with that person just as another human being, and you ask them, hopefully, they give anecdotes about the issue that you're covering. If it's case studies of sexual harassment in public schools, or if it's how kids do in math in this country versus another country. You don't try and get data out of people, you can do that yourself. You try and get them to tell you what their experience is. Those are the stories that I think draw us all into the story, more than any other set of numbers can.

I try and stay away from so-called "expert tape," where you get someone who has just done a study to tell and to give you numbers that mean very little. I mean, some of the numbers certainly can be outrageous; if we abuse them, we lose our listeners. What I'd like to do, and hopefully do well, is to go out and get the story where this story is happening. If the study is telling us that guns in schools are just out of control, then the story is not in the Center for Disease Control but rather in a school nearby that has struggled over the years and now has been forced to put metal detectors in their schools. I mean, there is life to that story that is not being told by numbers. The interviews that one does, I think, have to happen very spontaneously. I hate going out there with a set of questions. There is a very general preparation that you make for certain stories. But if you try and anticipate too much, and if you try and lead your questions, and lead your story too much, you've fallen into this horrible trap of going out and actually just having people fill in your lines. Rather than you really discovering for the first time a piece of information that you didn't know about. And when you do that, there's excitement to your story, there's excitement in your questions, there's honest-to-God curiosity that the reporter experiences that you wouldn't otherwise experience if you already knew what you're gonna write about. And so the spontaneity of any story really relies on, or depends on, the kinds of questions that you are asking. Then and there. And just off the top of your head.

One of the advantages of radio, of course, is that you've got a small machine and you're interviewing, and you can go on hopefully and interview somebody for a good piece or length of time, and be able to get some relationship, some of the dynamics of that going with that person. If you don't look people in the eye, and if you just keep looking at your notes and the next question that's there, without listening to the question or the answer that that person's giving you prior to your prior question. I've seen that happen quite often. You're just looking at your questions, and you're interviewing, "Okay, so what is next, and what is gonna happen now that..." I mean, there really is no relationship there with the interviewer. And that's really something that we all learn in a process, by the way. It's not something you learn in a classroom. It's learning after you've come back to your office, and you find out that, "Why didn't I ask this?" And it's a little bit of trial and error in interviewing people. That comes from a lot of having made a lot of errors myself. Believe me. Having come back and just kicked myself for not asking the right question.

ACCURACY: ESTABLISH YOUR CREDIBILITY

Good reporting to me really comes down to one word. That's accuracy. And fairness, actually. Two words. Using fairly the information you've got, and being all encompassing, as much as you can, of viewpoints, certainly when it's called for. But be accurate. That's really what good reporting comes down to. The writing, though, is the only way you can share that with anyone. And you can't be a good writer without being a good reporter, and you can't be a good reporter without being a good writer. If you look at the role of producers, the people kind of make all kinds of things come together so that they can be condensed into a story. That is to me a good match, good writing and good reporting. It's not necessarily the person that goes on the air, or whose voice you're going to listen to. But this person usually has a bird's-eye view of all the things, all the good components that have to come into a story.

Now with us, those of us who are on beats, because we, on and off, we do work with producers, but we often work by ourselves, we find ourselves really playing that dual role of being able to do the research that allows you to cover the ground we've had to cover, of finding the key players in a particular story. But of coming back and making all of that make sense with your writing. The accuracy, in reporting is really the only reason why people believe you. It's your credibility. And unless you have that total commitment to accuracy there is not a chance that people are going to either respect your work or believe what you're saying, let alone listen to you. I think we all have a little bit of room when we get started, before we need to establish very quickly our credibility, and that comes through hard work, and a lot of accuracy in your reporting. Once you establish those ground rules, then you can be creative. Then you can think about sound and broadcast. Then you can think about all these other things that we've talked about. About how you edit stories, how you go out and do interviews. But without that underlying commitment to accuracy and to then being able to express that, or at least convey that in very basic, very simple words and sentences, then it's the marriage of all those things, that allow you to just do a good job.

CULTURAL ACCURACY

Awareness and sensitivity are overused and I think they really do fall, they fall very close or become quite cliché-ish in many ways when we talk about culture. When we talk about the need to look out for cultural issues that can make or break, or are certainly integral, to a story. I would rather use the term "cultural accuracy," again going to that point. You know if you respect your story and the people in it, you will always look out or look for ways to tell their story. Not to be "sensitive" but to be accurate. And one of the points that I've always made about a language other than English in a story, in my case, for example, the use of Spanish-language tape, or any other language or paraphrasing a particular person's point of view. Or using a voice-over. Some might say translation directly, direct translation to a person's statement. I think all of those things, beyond going into the issues of sensitivity, you have to be accurate. I know that I'm always, I mean, I'm very lucky that I understand and I speak Spanish, and I'm always quite cautious in being able to use tape that I think is key to a particular story, but to use it accurately. So that there is respect for the person that's being interviewed, as well as respect for the facts in the story.

There is a whole area of cultural ethics that is far more prominent these days in journalism than maybe a few years ago because newsrooms in this country have realized that in order for us to really be fair and be thorough in covering communities, more and more are realizing that we're up against 90 to 150 dialects in any given community. And lineages in places like Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Places where the news comes alive. But they come alive in ways in which we've never really spent enough time in a way analyzing how the dynamics of culture play into a story. Whether it's a Rodney King story or whether it's a school election, I mean, these are stories that have to be told in the language that is either part of that community, and if that language doesn't happen to be English, then we have to find ways to be accurate. As accurate as we are when we're covering the English-dominant communities that we cover. And we cannot ask anything less of a reporter to be able to be accurate and to look out for those things. And not to paint with a broad brush minority communities, language-minority communities, ethnic communities, that have their own story to tell.

The journalistic ethics of covering those stories have to be quite mysterious in many ways, because we've not been schooled in those things. Certainly not in journalism schools when I was going to school. But we're coming up against them, certainly out in the real world. And we're realizing that we're not prepared. I've heard of reporters who've gone out and covered issues of busing, and yet not ever, with reporters being too cautious or too fearful of going out and actually interviewing people who are gonna be bused. And just making assumptions about what busing may mean to a community, without getting to know that community. And in order to get to know that community, you get to know their language, the way they speak, the way they review things, and that's a huge responsibility. And again, we're under the gun in a way to begin to understand those things because they become more prominent in certainly the larger cities in this country.