What is simple journalist questions for interview?

Okay, you're gonna conduct an interview, either audio or video. You probably wanna know a few things and plan it out. Here are five tips that you need to know before you actually start doing that. So you're gonna sit down and you're gonna go.

You wanna research the person before you actually do the  video  interview because then you don't know anything plus the person you're  researching   will be like, "Hey this guy knows what he's talking about!"

You gotta research it. If the person works for a company then you should research the company. See what they do, see what they contribute, see what their job is. See how the company's doing, see how big they are, see what their interests are. That's what they're going to be interested in. Do your research.

A lot of times you'll just email back and forth, and back and forth. Hey, I wanna ask these questions and they'll say okay that's cool and prep for this, and prep for this.

You're prepping the other person too. They just show up and go hi. I'm here for an interview.

What are you gonna ask me? Um you know when you were in tenth grade um no. There's gonna be research and emails back and forth. You can use a tool for that. There's a tool called Clearbit and it'll help you fill in all the blanks.

Okay, next you got your person right? And you're talking back and forth, we're gonna interview about this and we're gonna stay on this subject and we're not gonna touch this subject Cool. Now you need  to figure out uh let's go shoot. You need a location like.

I think not. You want something that has zero background noise. Looks nice and you'll never be interrupted. Right outer space. That's usually not the case. You're gonna need to find a location you're gonna deal, need to deal with certain things that come up. while you're doing the interview and during the interview. But instead of obsessing over this perfect location, find someplace you know will be just, it'll be semi-quiet you won't be interrupted, there won't be someone coming in, in the door and interrupting this person every time. 

You do wanna shoot around restaurants and everything else. You're gonna need to take extra efforts to make sure their mic'd properly and everything else, but if you're interviewing a restaurant owner, sure shoot them in the restaurant, just watch the noise level. Another good place to interview a person is in their office .

You're gonna have to do some cleanup and stuff like that, or a coffee shop or a park, or like somewhere that's just kind of neutral and there's not a lot of stuff going on. Now maybe you can't meet in person.

Well, tools like Zoom allow you to the conference and you can piece things together and make it look like there's something going on or just present that you're conferencing with this person..

You just think it through man. Think it through like nice and easy and quiet and whatever. The other thing about location shooting is no one ever does this and I don't get it. Why don't you do this? Hang some signs out there. Recording, on the air, doesn't interrupt, knock, and die! That's a good one.

Now you're gonna conduct this interview and maybe you were going back and forth but you want like ten questions open-ended that you wanna ask the person.

 Hey, tell me about your company.

Where'd you grow up?

Can you tell me more about

your passions in life?

Just open-ended questions that the person can talk about. And you wanna be prepared I mean if you're going back and forth and this guy shows up and he's all ready to talk and you're like well you know uh blah blah blah and I wanna do this and then we're gonna do the interview and yadda na na. And you're just talking and talking, that's not an interview that's you talking. Let the person talk, ask them a question.

Let them answer the question. You can always cut the stuff out later. Just put your open-ended questions down somewhere. You can use Google Docs, you can use Evernote, you can use an actual pad of paper with this thing called a pencil. I know it's old technology but it still works.

The other cool thing is you can end an interview and you can say do you have any questions for me? The person might ask you a question that you answer and may open up a whole new dialogue and all sorts of crunchy nuggets of information.

Now if you're doing this interview and you're sitting there with a notepad and you're scribbling and the person's answering and you're doing this, they're not gonna be engaged. It's not gonna be fun. You're gonna be and your pencil breaks. Don't do that. But you're gonna wanna record the interview that's occurring. 

One way is to use your iPhone or whatever phone you have. Put it on, do not disturb, and then just start the recording and get it close to the people so you have it really recorded. Another way is to buy an audio recorder. I mean we did a whole thing on audio recorders. The big long thing on audio recorders that'll show you the right audio recorder to use. Yeah, do that.

If you're gonna interview over the phone, you can use remote call recorder apps. I think Rev has one. You can also make a Zoom call and use their free recording feature. Hey look if you're gonna record someone, you really need to ask their permission if it's okay to record them. I mean if you're doing an interview and it's all set up, they know you're sitting down.

 But if you're gonna go up to someone and say hey I wanna ask you some questions and you hit a recorder and you don't tell them, When you're done with the interview, you need to transcribe that into the written material for the blog post or whatever you happen to be doing. Boy you know no journalist ever said this, I can't wait to get home and transcribe this interview! Research interviews and transcriptions.

These are really the most important parts of a journalist's work. Do what I've told you to do. Research the person you're going to interview with a subject you're gonna interview, then do the interview, record it in some way, and then get it transcribed.