More Thoughts on Interviewing

Last week, I posted some insights from a print and radio reporter who provided a great workshop to Youth Radio’s emerging journalists. I wanted to continue drawing from his insights, with a focus here on interviewing. I first learned to interview as an academic research assistant, my first year out of college. My boss at the time played the role of a caricatured nightmare interview subject and made each of us on the research team run through a ridiculous but instructive mock phone interview before she would let us start doing the real thing (we were interviewing non-profit arts leaders).

After that, I did a whole bunch of interviews as part of my own dissertation research, this time talking to teenagers about language and learning in the arts. Listening back to those recorded conversations was pure torture. I sounded like such an ass–all formal and stiff, like I might be wearing a white lab coat, but then at turns cringily phony and fawning (which is not only embarrassing but also methodologically problematic). I learned to lose the fakitude and just look this person in the eye and let myself get curious about their story, like I would a friend, but still interviews were never my shining research moments. 

 

Then I really had to rethink the whole undertaking when I started working in media production–when the goal of an interview wasn’t so much to collect empirical data for a scholarly thesis, but to draw out characters and unexpected moments of candor and compelling stories (while, of course, also getting the facts and gathering clean sound). I was still learning how to interview like a journalist (rather than a scholar), and I also had to teach these skills to the young reporters I was collaborating with on their stories. At Youth Radio, we’ve gone back and forth endlessly about how much our students should script their interviews in advance, developing detailed lists of questions. The benefit of the question list: we as editors can help young folks craft questions that are thoughtful, unbiased, relevant, and cover the scope of the story. The downside: listening back to the tape, I’ve heard warm, spontaneous, curious and creative young people transform into robots, reading mechanically from lists, sounding as if they’re not listening at all, not engaging or responding or building on the stories their interviewees share. 

 

A couple posts ago, I shared our Interview Tips from Youth Radio’s newsroom. Here, some added thoughts from a talented and seasoned (but still young himself!) journalist on the art of interviewing: 

A) Interviewing isn’t about questions and answers, it’s a relationship.  It’s like being on a date.  You’re not building rapport with someone so that you can get a better interview, that rapport IS the interview. 

B) You can and should train someone to be a better interview subject.  The first 20 minutes or so of an interview, I ask questions that seem on topic, but are actually irrelevant to my piece.  I don’t care about the answers.  The whole point is to help the interview subject understand the kind of answers I need once the questions do matter.  For instance, I’ll ask someone to describe a particular day for me.  When they say, “I got up,” I’ll interrupt and ask them how many times they hit snooze, whether the alarm beeps or plays music, if the floor is cold, what they have on their walls, whether their room is messy and if so what’s on the floor.  I’ll laugh extra hard if they say anything funny, because most interview subjects subconsciously want to please their interviewer, so laughing extra hard will encourage them to relax and be funny.  Once they’re giving me the kind of thoughtful, detailed, revealing answers I want — once they’re in a storytelling frame of mind — then I gradually start asking questions that matter.  And then I tend not to interrupt much, unless I have to.  It means my interviews run long, but I learn things I wouldn’t have known to ask about.

C) Everyone is an expert, everyone has more things to teach you then you could ever have time to learn.  And spending time with people is a privilege.  It’s important to remember nobody owes you their time, or their answers.  Make a person understand that, and they’ll feel powerful when you stick a mic on their face, not intimidated.  People who feel powerful give better interviews. 

D) Trust your curiosity.  If someone says something interesting that you didn’t expect, forget about the questions you meant to ask, and see where the conversation takes you. You can always circle back.

 

 

 

Making “Verite”

Last week, I went to Chicago with some Youth Radio colleagues for the Third Coast International Audio Festival. It’s a gathering of audio folks–mostly radio producers and podcasters, but also artists and film people and university-affiliated types (not that those categories are mutually exclusive, of course!). I’ve attended the conference before and always hugely appreciate a chance to hear great stories (including some by incredible young producers) and to get inside the craft and ethics of engaging listeners with sound.

I took some notes on two sessions in particular that got me thinking about making radio and writing ethnography–two projects that emanate from very different fields, politics, intentions, and institutional contexts, but still hold much in common to the extent that both are about capturing and conveying meaning. Making a point or moving a public through narrative. Observing and participating and immersing yourself in a complex social world and keeping record of that process–and then repackaging the source material into a story.

So… about those two sessions…

The first was from Claire Schoen, a documentarian who works in radio and film. She was talking about “verite”–using real-life scenes to “show” rather than “tell” your story. Some points that struck me from her talk:

* Big Rig: Schoen says her audio gear is pretty massive–shotgun mic, big old headphones, chunky recorder, etc., and that’s partly because she wants the best quality sound, but it’s also because she wants people to know that she’s recording. That struck me as important, given the temption to hope that the folks in your story–whether for media or academic research–will kind of halfway forget what you’re there for, even if you technically asked their permission, so they’ll “act natural,” which might to some extent compromise the ethic of informed consent.

* Remix: Schoen was really open about how radio producers manipulate sound in order to create in impression that listeners just heard something “deeply real.” We layer “clean” takes of voice tracks, ambience, sound effects, scenes, etc., and then remix and “sweeten” those elements in post-production to make it all “sing.” But where do you draw the line with this kind of amplification of the real? Is it okay to ask your characters to do something they would normally do (like go shopping), but maybe not on that day, or in that specific store, because you need that scene for your story? Can you use one sound (shooting a squirt gun into a bucket) to represent another (milking a goat)? These were among the questions Schoen asked. I found myself trying to think about not only how I would answer those questions for radio, but what are the analogous questions in ethnographic research?

Seems like lots of the really tricky stuff comes up when you grapple with the way you as a reporter/researcher participate–or try not to–in the scenes you capture and re-present. One strategy Schoen talked about was “nodding to the mic,” meaning those moments–and we’ve all heard them–when someone in a documentary makes it obvious that they know they’re on tape, by referring directly to the recording process. I’ve used that device in my academic writing, too–to break from the conceit of “realism” by calling out the fact that the story is made, as in, created–and in this sense is always partial, positioned, and incomplete.

A second session made this issue of putting yourself into your story its central focus. Sean Coles, who files stories for Marketplace, Weekend America, and This American Life, did a workshop called “The Wonders of Narcissism,” where he touted the virtues of jumping right into your own narrative, abandoning the old “fly on the wall” stance. Sean’s advice:

* Refer to yourself in your story.

* Talk to your friends for your story–just make sure you’re honest about who they are (e.g., don’t do a story about the latest greatest garage band and fail to mention that the lead singer is your college roommate).

* Make yourself the guinea pig, he says–so if you’re doing a story about Twitter or hula hooping–two examples he played–then actually try those things out, and use that tape in your piece.

* Admit the fact that you exist (instead of using the old convention of referring to yourself in the third person as “this reporter,” which is almost always cringy).

* “If you see something, say something,” Sean recommended. What I took from that last comment was, when something happens while you’re recording that you have a real life genuine human response to–a response that maybe says something about the kind of person you are, even when you’re not “on the job”– put it out there. I really like that idea–especially when I think back on all these painfully awkward interviews I carried out for my dissertation, where I sounded like I was doing my best to approximate the cadences of a “real” social scientist–and I came off sounding stiff and fake, at least to me when I listened back. Wish I had followed Sean’s advice back then and known, in his words, “not to hide the madness.”

Closed Eyed Stories

Okay, so maybe I’m just looking for excuses to explain my week-long lapse in posting, but here’s the thing. I really wanted to write something about this powerful montage my Youth Radio colleague Brandon McFarland cut together using excerpts from a series of stories we produced featuring the voices of young troops returning from Iraq, under which Brandon laid a track of his stirring original beats. It’s good stuff, and it raised some provocative editorial and creative questions for us, and highlighted how much has changed in both youth media and U.S. political culture since the “shock and awe” phase of the Iraq war. But I can’t for the life of me figure out how to upload audio onto this blog.

When I try to upload a file here using WordPress–one of the leading blog platforms–the only options I see are jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, and ppt. Now I am for sure not the most tech savvy individual, and there may be a very simple way to create an audio link (please let me know if I’m just being an idiot!). But still… it got me thinking… what is the value of sound-only storytelling in a video-crazed era, in an image-saturated culture, in a digital world where audio is, as I’ve been told more than once by my digerati friends, so yesterday?

I don’t want to get all ahistorical here, or to start invoking Walter Benjamin–although I am kinda tempted. But I do really want to figure out what it means that more and more audio producers are now experimenting with adding video to sound stories after the fact, so we can play the converged media game. I wonder what might get lost if the seduction, ease and power of capturing and distributing video makes audio seem tired, when sound is so often what makes me feel, for a few fleeting moments at least, wide awake with my eyes closed.

When Radio Isn’t Enough

Last week, Youth Radio participated in the National Media Education Conference, sponsored by the Alliance for a Media Literate America, in St. Louis. Ayesha Walker and I presented a listening session called, When Radio Isn’t Enough, where we considered two ways that young people reach beyond audio airwaves to spread their most urgent stories:

1. by connecting their radio features to concrete social justice efforts, aiming not only to describe but also to dislodge inequalities.

2. by leveraging digital and social media’s proliferating platforms, integrating sound, image, live performance, and conversation to share information and inspire feeling and action.

Ayesha played her commentary, From Blacksburg to Bay Area, where she reflects on violence in her own city…Richmond, California. She says while the mass shooting shocked the nation, no one is shocked when young people die from gun violence in her neighborhood.

“The heartbreaking incident at Virginia Tech makes me think of the ongoing devastation in my own city…. A lot of people were horrified by the number killed at Virginia Tech—33–in the span of a few hours. Here we see that number killed in slow motion—shot to death on inner city streets each month…”

After producing the story, Ayesha worked with Dawn Williams to develop an online curriculum resource for Teach Youth Radio, where we offer lesson ideas and additional research and resources designed to encourage educators to use youth media content and methods in their classrooms. It was a chance to expand on her commentary’s themes and for Ayesha to draw other young people into her process and the questions it raised–e.g., the decision to go ahead with the broadcast just days after the Virginia Tech shooting even though some outside editors thought it was too soon to focus on anyone but the victims of that specific tragedy.

In addition to Ayesha’s work, we played other stories from Youth Radio’s archive that students had produced for local and national radio (commercial and public), iTunes, MySpace, our own website, and live community events–sometimes repurposing/remixing/reframing a single narrative to suit those various outlets and reach mass and niche audiences.

The work we presented at NMEC really drove home the positioning of the youth media movement at the very epicenter (battleground???) of what Henry Jenkins calls, “Convergence Culture”–where “old and new media collide.”

To be continued…