How to interview
like a journalist
Good interviewing is not just important for journalists. It’s a key to better writing for any content creator.
by Kimberlee Meier
by Kimberlee Meier
Journalists are known as the writers of the first draft of history.
So much of writing that draft comes down to how well a journalist can interview someone. Writing out basic questions and gathering surface-level information is easy. But an outstanding interviewer can hold a conversation, draw out unique perspectives, and ultimately find the truth.
But the skill of interviewing like a journalist isn’t just useful for, well, journalists.
When Google announced it would rank content based on a new set of guidelines called E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness), many companies panicked. However, the key to meeting this benchmark is right in front of us: interviews.
Content writers and brands can use journalism-like interviews to create better articles, write-ups, and case studies, and become industry authorities. Each interview is an opportunity to build trust and get a unique, expert opinion on a topic to help shape a narrative.
Ready to learn how to interview like a journalist? We'll cover:
More than a Q&A
You must learn how to conduct (really good) research and have real, authentic conversations with people. With that said, there are some ways you can fast-track these skills to get better at interviewing quickly.
Here are some interview techniques I picked up from my years at the newsdesk.
Do your research. And
then do more research.
The foundation of any good interview is solid research. The more you know about a person, the easier it'll be for you to ask deep questions and uncover information.
As The New York Times’ Campus Weblines publication pointed out, there are few things more embarrassing than an interviewer not knowing what has already been written about a subject:
A question on the order of, 'Well, Mr Jones, have you been teaching here long?' almost guarantees a poor interview. Mr Jones almost immediately begins to look at his watch to try to figure out a way to get out of this.
A far better question, in the same area, may be: 'Can we talk about the changes that have occurred during your eight years here at Central?'
Or: 'You were at East High for a number of years before coming here. Why did you move? Are glad you did?'
Or: 'What are the major differences between East High, where you taught before coming here, and our school?'
Interview questions like these, which probe beyond the surface, require knowledge. I like to start with a Google search. This is where you dig into everything you can find out about the interviewee:
- Background information. Where did they grow up? What nationality are they? Where did they go to school? Where do they work? Depending on what your actual interview is about, find out the ‘foundation’ information about your subject. At the very least, these details give you some icebreakers for the start of the interview.
- Social media. Every interviewee will likely have a social media presence somewhere. Start with LinkedIn, X, and Facebook, and then move on to other platforms like TikTok or Instagram to find out whatever you can about them. Here is where you will find out the subject's interests, family, friends, and even information like their political beliefs.
- Other interviews. Watch any publicly available interviews or read previous interview articles the subject has appeared in online. Is there anything interesting that wasn't followed up on properly? Make a note of it for your interview.
Get a solid understanding of who the subject is and what their opinions are on major topics. The more you know, the easier it’ll be to have an authentic conversation with the person when it’s time for your interview. If information is thin, don’t be afraid to look at other sources of information, like Quora, Reddit and YouTube, to learn even more about them.
Put any information you find in a dump file and split it into sections — like background, interests and topics — so it’s easier to come up with a question list.
An interview may only take 30 minutes, but your research will take much longer. Put aside at least an hour or two to deeply research your subject.
Have a (very) good list
of questions
Any journalist will tell you that writing a basic list of questions is an absolute must before you step into any interview.
A questions list acts as a blueprint for the topics you want to cover and also the information you need to get from your subject during the interview. When I was studying Journalism at the University of South Australia, my tutors taught me a formula (of sorts) for how to approach an interview. It was all very simple:
- gather some basic information about the person you are interviewing
- write out 10-15 questions you want to ask them, and
- take notes and follow up on any unclear details.
"It’s the rules you break that turn a good interview into a great one."
Now, these are some solid ground rules for how to interview someone. But interviewing real people is more nuanced, because everyone is different. Julian Sher argues in his guide to mastering investigative interviews that journalists should learn the rules — and then break them.
I love this.
Look, the basic rules around interviewing, like research and questions, are super important. But it’s the rules you break (like deviating from the script or challenging your subject) that turn a good interview into a great one.
Andrew Warner has some fantastic advice on how to break interview rules (while still getting what you need) in his book, Stop Asking Questions:
- Start small. Don’t go too hard with your questions too early. It’s important to get your subject comfortable with you otherwise it’s going to be (very) hard for them to open up throughout the interview. Ask questions about the interviewee’s background or a recent (non-work) activity you noticed them posting about on social media to start a conversation.
- Stay flexible. Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions and then let your subject take the lead. Let’s say you are interviewing an expert about sustainable food systems, an open-ended question could be something like ‘What do you think the biggest barrier is to regenerative food systems?’ Then, listen for interesting insights in their answers to ask follow-up questions.
- Ask for examples. If your subject isn’t giving you much with open-ended questions, try the examples approach. In the above example, instead of asking ‘What do you think the biggest barrier is to regenerative food systems?’ You could ask something like ‘What are three ways companies are trying to improve access to regenerative food systems?’ Asking for examples helps the interviewee to focus and give a more specific answer.
Putting together a solid question list will all depend on how much work you put in during the research phase. When someone asked on Quora how to plan questions for an interview, New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor said to avoid hypotheticals and focus on “high-yielding questions”:
“I write about and often interview powerful people for a living, and I strongly believe the answer is: there is no one question that works for everyone. In fact, the secret to asking great questions is avoiding generalities or broad philosophical inquiries. Hypotheticals are worst of all, because they’re going to give you the opposite of what you want, which is the person’s real, lived experience.
“To ask a really high-yielding question, you need to have done your homework. In my experience, the kinds of general questions named above don’t work very well. (Does anyone have a truly dazzling answer to the old 'If you could meet anyone, living or dead?')
Kantor used this approach with US President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama in 2009. Her goal was to avoid generic soundbites and get unrehearsed, honest answers from the couple. During her research, Kantor discovered equality was a serious issue in their marriage, so one of her questions was:
"How do you have an equal marriage when one person is president?"
The question had many layers:
- Through Kantor’s research, she discovered Michelle was Barack’s supervisor at the Chicago law firm where they met.
- Now, he was the President and Michelle had an unelected role at the White House.
Focusing on this switch in power dynamics forced the couple to open up on how they balanced equality, with Michelle admitting they were equals in their private lives if not in their public lives. The whole exchange revealed information that no other journalist had managed to uncover.
The key was to ask the right question based on any golden nuggets found during the research phase.
Again, the New York Times has some useful advice on how to put your question list together. Corey Kilgannon recommends writing your questions on an index card or in a notebook so you don’t forget anything important. But his biggest piece of advice was to avoid asking — what he called — Big Questions.
“When I was starting out as a journalist, I thought Big Questions were the way you get to Big Answers. Not so, at least in my experience. Overly ambitious and reaching questions often shut people down — it’s just too much pressure to come up with the meaning of life or whatever.
“Far more effective, I think, is when you ask them about smaller details. What did your room look like when you were a kid? What kind of stuff was on your wall? Did you like being in there or not really? Non-small information invariably bubbles up between the cracks.”
Have a list of questions, but don't have a strict structure for the interview. Prioritise the back-and-forth chemistry with a subject over getting every question answered. It's a conversation — not an interrogation.
Use active listening to go where your interviewee wants to go
According to reporter Joe Coscarelli, a journalist should know enough about the interviewee’s life and work to carry a natural conversation and touch on new topics without relying on a question list.
“You want to have the most natural possible conversation with someone in a totally unnatural environment,” he explains.
The key to achieving this is to use active listening during your entire interview.
This technique is used by journalists to pick up ‘crumbs’ of information their subject drops when they answer a question. These crumbs are used to ask deeper, more informed follow-up questions to get more details.
To use active listening:
- Get your source talking. Focus on the flow of your conversation, ask ‘how’ or ‘why’ and always have follow-up questions.
- Give your full attention. The best interviews are social interactions. If your subject says something really interesting, make a quick note but don’t transcribe it word for word. Instead, make sure your interviewee knows you are listening to every word.
- Have your next question ready. Use active listening to avoid awkward silences in your interview. Listen carefully to everything your subject says and focus on finding those crumbs in their answer. If they drop one, use it to frame up the next question in your mind so it’s ready when they are finished talking.
One of the best active listening interviewers (in my opinion) doesn’t work at the New York Times or Washington Post. He’s a YouTuber named Sean Evans, who interviews celebrities while they eat (insanely spicy) chicken wings on his show, Hot Ones.
Hot Ones humanises celebrities in a way that other interviews cannot. And I think we can all learn a thing or two from Evans’ interview style.
Hot Ones guests are consistently impressed with how prepared Evans is and how well the conversation flows throughout the segment.
As Evans told Drew Barrymore in a recent interview, his success with guests comes down to listening to them. He consistently looks for cues, like a guest’s body language or how they react to his questions, to guide what he will ask next in his follow-ups. He likened it to a pet cat letting its owner know where it likes to get patted.
“Listen. Because if that person feels comfortable it's like, I've used this analogy before, [how] a cat will always let you know where it likes to get pet.”
Take cues from the subject's body language. Know when to step back and let them talk. But also step up and steer the conversation if it starts to go off track.
Take notes and double check the important bits
One of the most impactful skills I've sharpened for interviews is note-taking. Effective note-taking during interviews allows you to capture important nuggets of information a subject throws out when they answer a question.
Here’s how I like to take notes:
- Dot points. Unless you know shorthand, keeping notes in dot points is the only way you will keep up with the interviewee. Take down anything important mentioned, like names and events.
- Circling or underlining. This quick trick really helps when you go back through your notes. I like to circle anything the subject says that I want to follow up on at the end of the interview for clarification. If they say something I think is really important or could be the angle of an article, I underline it so it's easy to find later.
- Date, name, title. Always add the date of the interview to the top of your notebook, along with the subject’s full name and title/job role. I like to do this to keep things organised. Accurate notes are also a record, (super) important if an interviewee ever has an issue with the information or direct quotes you publish from your conversation with them.
These notes also help at the end of the interview if you need to clarify information. Remember, this is your last chance to get any additional insights from the interviewee, so ask them if they want to add anything. Tina Rosenberg, who founded Solutions Journalism Network, has two pieces of advice on how to wrap up an interview:
- She always asks: “Is there anything I should ask you about that I haven’t?”
- When you ask interview sources about a problem, ask them: “Who’s doing a better job with this?” Rosenberg says she has uncovered many stories by asking this simple question.
Take note of the details in the interviewee’s answers, keep an accurate record, and clarify anything you aren’t 100% sure about. Oh, and don’t be afraid to ask… “What did I miss?”. It’s amazing what a subject can remember as an interview is wrapping up.
Use journalistic interviews to make your content stand out
There’s something unique about the way journalists interview subjects. And there are no shortcuts.
A journalistic interview relies on building rapport, doing research, and asking tough questions. It's also about starting a conversation. The best interviews don't feel like interviews because the subject is comfortable enough to talk to you. They will reveal information that goes beyond what other interviewers gather on a superficial level.
My advice for your next interview is to stick to three rules: prepare well, ask unique questions, and listen more than you talk.
The rest of the rules? Don't be afraid to break 'em.
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