If you're going to interview someone, and it's not a breaking news story, you should do some preparation. Now, there are exceptions to the rule. If there's a major car crash, and you're first to the scene or you happen to be driving by, and you want to interview someone, you might not know anything about the person. And your question may be, can you tell us what happened to you and you're capturing the video. But if you are interviewing an expert, a politician, an author, someone who has real expertise, I would advise you do some research. Now if the person has written 10 books, I'm not saying you have to read every single page of every book, but certainly Google them find out what their main ideas are, find out at least a summary of their best selling books.
Try to check out their blog. Google them in the news section of Google to find out what they've said recently that's been in the news. And that way, you can add to the conversation you can add to what people already Know You can ask more insightful questions. Now the next thing I would recommend you do is prepare questions. And if you really want to be thorough, and especially as you get going in this process, write them all down, type them up. Now, you don't have to go through all the questions when you're doing the interview.
You certainly don't have to read the questions and I would recommend that you not read the questions in front of the person you want it to seem more like a conversation. But the sheer act of thinking about questions, writing them down or typing them up, brings clarity to the mind it will help you in the interview, because you'll be able to quickly pull things up that you already thought about and wrote. A lot of the best journalists in the world still do that barbara walters will write out hundreds of questions and have her staff write out questions when she's preparing to interview major newsmakers doesn't mean you get to all of them or even half of But it does help prepare the mind and get you into a better mindset. So that's the first step, prepare, do some research. Don't just look at the person's official bio, see what else is being written about them, see what else they've done in the news lately.
That way, you can be prepared to ask intelligent questions. The more the person you're interviewing feels like this is an intelligent conversation Generally, the longer they want to talk to you, the more information they'll give you. The more they like you, the more they want to do interviews again and the more they'll give you good information for your story.