Interview Techniques

Great interviews don’t happen when you’re unprepared. It’s vital to know how to properly conduct interviews, as well as handy tips to be able to use whenever you find yourself in need of help. The movie Shattered Glass highlighted useful and important techniques that we are sure to start using as we find ourselves conducting interviews in our Podcast. 

• A key part of a good interview is to write down every single observation. Small details such as background music, the colour of their shirt, and their posture should all be written down. Even though these seemingly small details may not matter at the moment, they could be valuable tools to use while building your story for a Podcast or article.

• In general, assumptions are never a good idea. It’s so easy for everybody to jump to conclusions. We tend to assume what’s happening when we don’t know the full picture. We fill in the blanks ourselves with our own understanding of the situations, for example from what we hear and see just to get the job done. Doing this can get you to have the wrong idea of things that may cause big trouble in the future. 

• An interview technique is to fact check everything. Fact-checking is when you investigate an issue in order to verify the facts. It is done usually before you publicize an article. It is important to fact check because there is too much misleading, false claims, and fake news spreading around that readers no longer know what to believe.

• A crucial part of an interview with someone is getting their contact information. This can be from their name, phone number, to other more unusual information. This can be useful later for when you need to get back to them to reassure a few points or statements they made that were unclear in your notes. Having this also adds credibility to your work if someone questions who this person was, you have their information to show or give.

• Everyone wants to have an interview go exactly how they planned it to go inside their heads. So, if a question is not answered according to plan, we always have an urge to lie and change it. This is the worst thing to do in an interview because every detail matters and builds on to the person or story being told. If someone catches a small lie, they may not trust your work anymore and question if you’ve told other lies, thus ruining any good reputation you may have established as a writer or podcaster.

Interviewing is a skill you need to keep developing, so for novice podcasters like ourselves, we found these very helpful. Following these 5 techniques we have caught from the movie Shattered Glass will guide you to have the perfect interview. Interviews are always going to be different, so these universal tips and tricks are sure to be useful whenever you find yourself having to conduct one.