Elizabeth Arnold  On Reporting


ADVICE FOR INTERVIEWS

Everybody does interviews differently. I think sometimes there's a tendency to overprepare for interviews and that leads to the problem of asking questions and not listening to the answers and then asking the next question. Instead, if you ask one question, and you listen to the answer, and you ask questions from that, you're going to get a much more provocative interview, and it'll be much more like a natural conversation, so thoughts will flow. The person won't be as conscious that they are being interviewed. They're more apt to give you more interesting answers and you're more apt to sort of get to something as opposed to answering A, B, C, D, E, and F. I've definitely done interviews where I had a whole list of questions 'cause I was so nervous, and I go back and I listen to the tape, and I'm embarrassed because I hear myself asking questions that the guy has just answered in the previous question. So it's much better to not have a preconceived idea of how this thing is going to go. Although I do generally try to have a start and a finish. I ask a very broad easy open question to start, just to get the person loosened up and at ease, and get a sense of how they're gonna be. And then I tend to ask a question at the end that sort of wraps things up. If you do that, they sort of do an "in conclusion," kind of a, they sense that the interview is wrapping up, and so they're more apt to throw in something that they had wanted to say that you maybe didn't ask them about. So instead of saying is there anything else that you want to say, you ask a question that sort of ends the interview, and they get that idea and they tend to wrap things up as well.

Well, it's funny, it's like at a restaurant or at home, when your mother says, "Don't you want some more beef stew?" and you go, "No, no, no," and she keeps holding the plate out so you eventually take it. You keep holding that microphone out, eventually they'll add something else, or they'll say it again, perhaps in a better way. So you have two versions to choose from.

WHAT THEY CAN'T TEACH IN JOURNALISM SCHOOL

Shortcuts. I mean, there's a million shortcuts that you learn. I couldn't even begin to do that, to list that. It's something my father told me a long time ago, and I think it's somebody else's quote. I was both a painter and an English major, and before I either painted or wrote, my father would always say, "Before you write, consider the beauty of a blank page. Before you paint, consider the beauty of a blank canvas." You waste a lot of time gathering too much material and then whittling it down. If you organize your thoughts, think about really what it is you want to say in your story. Or what it is you're trying to find out. You can waste a lot of time going out and talking to people about things that are not really related to the story but you think it's going to lead you somewhere. One thing they don't teach you in journalism school, or in any school, is that you're on deadline. And you only have a certain amount of time. And if you get involved in extraneous stuff, you're going to waste just as much time cutting it all out as you did putting it all in. There's also a tendency to try and show all that you know in your story. "Well I know this, well I know that, I learned this, I learned that." Which doesn't have anything to do with the story, but it makes you look good because you know all these things. You've got to cut all that out. So the paring down takes just as much time as the gathering. And I guess that's sort of, it's a shortcut. Think about that when you're doing a story.

AVOID PRE-WRITING YOUR STORIES

The idea that the reporter has the story before they go out and start doing interviews — I don't. I mean, the best stories that I write, I find, I don't know the answer. Right after Anita Hill, during Anita Hill, I wanted to do a story on what women were thinking and what the political ramifications were going to be, whether this was going to influence how women were going to vote in the future. And I didn't know the answer to that question. Turned out to be one of the best stories I've written because I went out and generally said, "Are women going to vote differently now, are more women going to come to the polls?" And I learned that actually women vote just like men. And that women don't vote for women candidates. It doesn't work that way. In fact, women vote more for economical reasons than anything else because they're the first hired and last fired and they balance the checkbooks. So I went out and didn't know what the story was. And that turned out to be one of the best stories. So I wasn't looking for specific quotes, and I wasn't setting things up. There's a problem that reporters will run into, and that is they'll write a story where they're setting up each quote. "Here are the points I want to make, and this is what I want him to say," so you're setting up, when you hear the story, you can hear that in the story. It's not a discovery, it's more of a billboard or a set-up.