media - Why I hate email interviews
It is happened these days a few times to offer. I'm getting an interview request and I offer a range of ways to talk to me: Skype, Gmail, msn or even a normal phone. But all too often - especially requests from US, no clue why that is - the other side prefers an email interview, as if such a thing exists.
Years ago I was with a colleague sitting in the Belfast Sinn Fein office, the republican movement in Northern Ireland, for an interview with their leader Gerry Adams. Also waiting were two Italian journalists who did not speak very much English, at least not enough to interview him. How are you going to solve that, we wanted to know. They showed us a paper with all their questions translated into English. They would present that to Adams and then tape his answers. Somebody else in Italy was going to translate that for them.
We thought, and later Adams agreed, that this was a bizarre thing to do. Interviewing is a bit more than just getting information. As an interviewee you want to make sure the interview gets it. As an interviewer you need the opportunity to ask follow-up questions. An interview should be a conversation.
And when I'm writing the answers for an email interview, I tend to have the idea that I'm doing the work of the interviewer.
2 comments:
Fons --
I prefer to do my interviews in person or at least by telephone whenever possible, but sometimes email interviews work better. Here are some reasons:
1. When calling China from the United States, the connection is often very very bad. Last summer, when I was travelling in the US, I was forced to switch to email interviews for the bulk of my work on China stories because I literally couldn't get anyone on the phone with a good enough connection to talk to them! (For this reason, also, when scheduling interviews from China to the United States, I always prefer to call out rather than having people call in -- the sound quality, for some reason, is much much better for outbound calls.)
2. When interviewing someone with an accent. Many people who are non-native speakers of English have an easier time reading and writing than speaking -- especially on the telephone, when you don't have visual cues. It also can be difficult to understand an accent over the telephone -- and embarrassing to have to keep asking the person to repeat everything.
3. When working across time zones. Especially when you have a few days to file a story (so there's time to ask follow-up questions by email) it can be easier to send quations by email rather than scheduling at interview in the middle of the night for you, or for the interviewee.
4. When dealing with highly technical information, or a lot of Web links. It is much easier to email someone an URL than to spell it out over the telephone. The same applies for numbers or difficult names.
5. When an interview is secondary for the story. If all I need from a person is a quick sentence, and I don't really need it that badly, it is much easier to send them an email asking for a quick comment than to go to all the trouble of scheduling a formal interview.
6. When working on a very large project. In the time it takes to set up and do one telephone interview, I can send our requests for 20 or more email quotes -- and even is the majority of people don't get back to me, or decline to comment, I can still get a lot more perspectives into the article than I would have been able to otherwise.
-- Maria
(Yes, I'm on deadline and yes, I'm procrastinating! I really should be calling people right now and setting up interviews!)
As a journalist always on deadline, it is just more efficient to utilize technology whenever possible. It is not true that requesting a technologically advanced person, to answer an email, is asking that person to "do the work of the interviewer," but rather, simply a more efficient, and does not then require someone to transcribe the information.
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