Part IV
Finding Out What to Write
12
News Hunters and News Gatherers
What You’ll Learn_________________________
This chapter isn’t specifically about how to write for broadcast news. But without this chapter and what it teaches you, you may have nothing to write about. The best broadcast writer in America is powerless if she doesn’t know how to hunt down and gather the news.
It’s not rocket science; it’s really just a matter of using your natural human curiosity, and your capacity for persistence. Many people confronted with a news story wouldn’t know where to start. A plane crashes, a murder is discovered, a legislative bill is defeated, a baseball player is injured. Where do you go for information to write your story? How do you research on the Internet? How do you work on the telephone? How do you pull off productive interviews? How do you know what to pursue and what to drop?
Let’s begin with you. If you’re standing still in a traffic jam and you can see flashing lights suggesting an accident a quarter mile ahead, will you sit in your car, turn the music up loud, and wait for the obstruction to be cleared? Or will you search for a radio newscast to tell you what’s going on? Or ask the driver in the car next to you if she knows what the problem is? Or, if it’s neither obstructive for other idle drivers nor dangerous, will you try to pull off the road and get out of your car and hightail it up to the accident itself so you can find out firsthand?
If you’d want to go there yourself, you have the instinct for news. You’d already be demonstrating your curiosity and your persistence, which are the personal qualities you really need to be a journalist. After all, the root of the word is “journal.” When you try to see the accident for yourself, you’re trying to gather the information you’d need to keep a journal, to write a story about what you’ve seen.
What you’ll learn in this chapter is how to react to news. How to put those personal qualities to good use by learning who to talk to, where to go, what to look for when you’re covering the news. The rules are the same for broadcast and print journalists alike. Follow your nose, don’t give up!
The Terms of the Story____________
Shotgun Microphone A long microphone, usually more than a foot long, shielded with a fuzzy-looking cover to filter out the wind. It only picks up the sound from the narrow direction in which it is pointed, so that superfluous noise from either side is minimized.
On Camera Standup The reporter telling a portion of the story on camera anywhere in the piece—at the top, in the middle, or at the end—rather than just voiceover.
On Camera Bridge An on camera standup somewhere in the middle of a story, between, or bridging, two other elements.
Feedpoint The television facility, satellite truck or satellite pack, or any other place from which you transmit (“feed”) your video.
News Release A notice or memo put out by someone who wants journalists to know about developments within the organization for which he works.
Who Reports, Who Writes?
The first distinction you should understand is this: The production of a newscast or even a single story for radio or TV is a team effort. Everyone involved—the newsroom editors, the broadcast producers, the field technicians, the reporters on the street—is a journalist. Every one of them makes decisions that affect the coverage technically, logistically, creatively, or editorially. It doesn’t really matter which specific field you personally have chosen to pursue; if you touch any piece of a story, you’re a journalist. Just remember, you probably couldn’t have done it by yourself.
Read these anecdotes about the importance of the whole team. You’ll see what I mean. Everyone’s a journalist. Everyone’s part of the team.
“Unsung Journalists”
Two of the most successful stories in which I was ever involved—stories that won awards and acclaim—succeeded only because of colleagues who many people don’t define as journalists. But I do, because without them and their persistence, one of these stories would have been unremarkable and the other, unseen. I tell them so you’ll appreciate the entire team with which you work.
The first you’ve read about already; it was three days after the catastrophic earthquake in Italy, southeast of Naples. A couple of thousand people in several dozen villages had died, many because their humble homes collapsed on top of them during their Sunday supper.
For coverage like this, you want to find a fresh angle each day, and that becomes a challenge. Pretty soon the “big picture” stories are done, and your job as a journalist is to find the small stories, the personal stories that illustrate the big pain of the victims.
On day three after the earthquake, with a helicopter at our command, we bounced from village to village. But they all had casualties, they all were reduced to rubble. What would we do differently than what we had done the days before?
After a couple of hours of daylight we were in our second or third village, still empty-handed, when we heard a man shouting and saw him frantically gesturing atop a huge pile of rubble. He was shouting in Italian, but one member of our team knew the language and said, “He thinks he’s found someone alive.”
He had indeed. We scrambled with our camera gear to the top of the pile and spent the next six hours there. The rescuer who had shouted that first alarm had heard a squeal—just a tiny, weak squeal, but it sounded human. It was. It was a woman who, we learned before the end of the day, had been buried about six feet down, trapped by concrete and thick wood beams, the body of her dead sister on top of her.
For those six hours we watched and recorded as rescuers got her out. They had to work painstakingly slowly. This pile of rubble was a house of cards; if they moved the wrong stick or stone, the whole precarious pile could collapse, burying not just the survivor but the rescuers and, incidentally, us!
Over time, the squeal came more often, and eventually got louder. Rescuers delicately opening a passage were getting closer and closer. But in all those hours, we never saw the woman, we only heard her. And that’s where Lenny Jenson comes in.
He was our sound man. He had a long shotgun microphone, and for six hours he held his arm fully extended into the ever deeper hole. For six hours he picked up the survivor’s squeals, and the dramatic sounds rescuers made as they warily snapped thin twigs and lifted small stones, wondering whether each would be the one to cause this pile to collapse upon itself.
“Somewhere down there is a woman named Lisa.…” That’s how our dramatic story on World News Tonight began, then it kept getting even better. “This rescue worker cut up his face but said, ‘I touched Lisa’s hand, my blood doesn’t matter.” ‘In the story, we didn’t see Lisa until the very end, when she was pulled from the hole and rushed to an ambulance waiting alongside the rubble, but viewers would hardly even notice, because we heard her. We heard every squeal, and every twig broken in the path to her crypt.
The story won an Emmy, for best spot news coverage on a network. I got a statue. So did the cameraman. But nobody at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (which awards Emmys) recognized Lenny’s incomparable achievement.
They should have. We sure did. Officially he was a sound technician, but it was his per-sistence—his instinct as a journalist—that made the story so special.
The second story was about the bloody fighting in early 1979 during the revolution in Iran, when forces supporting Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini pushed the American-backed Shah (like “king”) of Iran from power. Because it had lots of oil and shared a border with America’s Cold War rival the Soviet Union, Iran was an important American ally going down the drain.
It was a brush fire revolution. For months there had been brutal one-sided massacres by the Shah’s soldiers against unarmed civilian dissidents. Hundreds died in downtown Tehran, the Iranian capital, in a single day. One Friday night in February, following yet another massacre, fighting broke out at a barracks between uniformed soldiers loyal to the Shah and the rebels and soldiers wearing the same uniforms, whose loyalty had shifted to the militant Ayatollah.
The fighting quickly spread to the streets. Within hours there was gunfire all over the capital, and soon after that, all over the country. Dissident soldiers (those who changed sides) were giving their weapons and ammunition to the rebels. For the first time, it was an even fight.
But the dissidents were scared. The fighting had spread so fast that the soldiers who had joined the rebels were still in their uniforms, easily identifiable if their pictures were taken and they probably would have been summarily court–martialed and executed, and they knew it. So word swiftly spread on the streets: if you see a camera, destroy it.
With my ABC News crew, we were in the middle of all this. We had spectacular footage illustrating the passion of the rebels and the fierceness of the fighting, but soon we learned about the ban on cameras. So we had to hide in storefronts along battle–torn streets, then dash out through their broken windows and grab a few shots and run somewhere else with a mad mob on our tails to temporarily hide again.
Eventually on that first day of fighting, we needed just one more element to make our coverage complete: the on-camera “standup.” In a dangerous situation like that, you don’t want to expose yourself any longer than necessary, so before you leap into the street and turn on the camera, you make sure everyone’s ready, the camera’s rolling, the microphone is activated, and the script is memorized. You probably won’t get a second chance.
We jumped onto the street and the moment the cameraman was steady, I started talking: “The battle started late last night when the Shah’s Imperial Guard entered the Farahabad military base here in eastern Tehran. Fighting broke out, civilians started getting guns, and military mutinies began en-masse. And street fighters, to protect military defectors’ identities, started turning on newsmen. Whenever we openly turned our camera toward the street…”
At that point, just before the end of the on-camera bridge, someone spotted us. Someone with a gun. He turned and fired, and with the bullets whistling within inches of our heads, we all hit the ground, then as he and his compatriots came running, we jumped up and ran ourselves. By the time the gunman could carefully aim again, we had rounded a corner and disappeared into a maze of doorways.
It would be quite a television story, but the question was, how do we get it on the air? Because of the fighting, our regular feedpoint at Iranian television was shut down. Normally we’d then ship our tape on an airplane leaving the country, but because of the heavy fighting everywhere, the airport had tanks on the runways and was shut down too.
This leads to Maurice James. He was a sometimes-sound technician who more often served as courier for our ABC Paris bureau. He was in Iran for the coverage and with us that day simply because we needed an extra body to help haul supplies.
Maurice assessed the situation. We had remarkable video, but unless it found its way out of Iran, it would never make it on the air. So he made it happen. Amidst heavy fighting, he got through to the airport, searching for any route out of Iran. He pushed his way into the terminal, teeming with frantic people trying to escape, and spotted just one plane on the tarmac. But the doors from the terminal to the tarmac where the plane was waiting were locked and guarded, so keeping as low a profile as he could in the chaos, Maurice found the freight department, snuck through, ran toward terrified passengers scrambling up the airliner’s steps, offered money and a convincing plea to whoever would carry our tapes, and got our story on the only flight out—to Tel Aviv. ABC had a bureau there, and that’s where the piece was edited and fed to ABC New York.
As it turned out, this was the only video to make it out of Iran on this key weekend of the revolution. ABC News ended up feeding it via satellite to news syndicates all over the world. All thanks to Maurice. Did his I.D. card say “journalist”? No. Was he one? Yes. That day, he was the best.
What’s the Point?
Even though your job description may not say it, if you work in a newsroom, or on a news team, you’re a journalist. And if you never leave the newsroom, you’re a journalist. You have to be. Few stories are the product of one person alone; in broadcasting, that is next to impossible. Whatever role you play, you make decisions that help shape stories. Curiosity, persistence, we’re all born with them. It’s up to you to activate them.
From the Melodramatic to the Mundane
There are a few things you need, of course, in addition to curiosity and persistence.
For starters, you should acquire some of the pocket-size tools—as books or soft-ware—that any good writer should not work without: an atlas, an almanac, a dictionary, and an encyclopedia. Pretty mundane? Yes, but also pretty irreplaceable. Why?
Imagine you have to write a piece from the newsroom about a nuclear reactor leak someplace in Russia called Chernobyl. You should at least tell your audience where in Russia this place is—northeast of Moscow, southwest of Moscow, a hundred miles away, a thousand miles? These are details that help viewers and listeners put the story into perspective. Find them in the atlas.
Or imagine that you learn ten minutes before your newscast that the president has been assassinated. Was he the forty-second or the forty-third? For a story of this magnitude, that’s a perspective you’ll want to include. The almanac has it.
Now imagine you’ve come up against a word you want to use in a story but you’re not absolutely sure of its definition, or for that matter, its correct spelling (which is especially important if a script is displayed in a CG on the bottom of people’s TV screens). Any decent computer these days has spell check and thesaurus tools, but sometimes your pocket dictionary still ends up being more efficient, and providing more information. Spell check won’t catch the wrong spelling or volunteer the correct meaning of a word that’s spelled more than one way (for example, “horse” and “hoarse,” “sew” and “sow,” and “to,” “too,” and “two”).
Finally, imagine yourself charged with an assignment to write about a new discovery in the solar system, or about alligators in Florida, or about Communist China. There is no substitute for an online, software-installed, or single volume paperback encyclopedia.
Making Sure You’re Wired
Those reference tools are indispensable, but they will not tell you what’s going on in your world or your city today. The wire services will, often with more breadth and depth than you’ll find anywhere else. So will other news organizations’ web sites, as well as their regular daily output. So will news releases from people and organizations that want to attract your attention. And so will police and fire department and Civil Air Patrol and other emergency service radios (also known as “scanners”), to which a good journalist—and inescapably any assignment editor—must keep one ear attuned.
Perhaps the most important lesson to learn about all these sources of information is that they are just that: sources. They may or may not be accurate, and they may or may not be up-to-date.
What does this mean? Don’t depend exclusively on sources, because their information may contain mistakes. The initial report of a plane crash with many casualties sometimes mercifully turns out to be overblown. The first word of an earthquake with “at least a hundred dead” sometimes sadly evolves as accounts trickle in to a total death toll in the thousands. The news release predicting one hundred thousand people at a demonstration sometimes self-servingly turns out to be a thousand percent inflated.
The 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, probably offer the most poignant example: the county sheriff himself publicly announced that the death toll might be as big as thirty. High as it was at thirteen, thankfully it wasn’t half as high as the sheriff’s indiscriminate prediction. Many Denver area TV and radio stations broadcast the sheriff’s erroneous number in their live coverage (which was being linked to stations and networks nationwide), but thanks to newsroom veterans, some knew to advise their audiences that even though the sheriff said it, it might not be accurate. How did they know? From experience: the situation was still fluid, the school had not yet been secured, the sheriff could not substantiate his figure.
What’s the Point?
Be careful. That’s all, just be careful. Sometimes inevitably you have to trust your gut (such as when you have no time for personal research), but whenever possible, don’t trust anyone or anything until you have checked it out yourself, firsthand.
During the war against Iraq in 2003, the coverage of an American family whose daughter, Jessica Lynch, was held as a prisoner of war until being dramatically rescued from an Iraqi hospital by fellow American troops, is an embarrassing example of misplaced trust. The reporter who wrote about the family for the New York Times, Jayson Blair, didn’t really go to their West Virginia home as he claimed he did. He fabricated quotes, and even made up an erroneous description of the home itself. Ultimately he brought disgrace to the whole paper and was fired, but once his fraudulent reporting itself became a national story, reporters across the United States admitted that they’d incorporated information from the Times into their own stories.
Wired Language, Your Language
Another possible problem, particularly in the case of the wire services (and newspaper clippings), is that they may or may not communicate the news in language you want to use. First of all, they’re usually written in a style fit for the eyes, not the ears (in Chapters 4 and 5, you read more on the difference between writing for print and writing for broadcast). That’s a style you don’t want to use. Second, and much more important, unless you personally know that the wire service reporter or newspaper writer has an unparalleled passion for accuracy and balance, not to mention a good sense for choosing the best lead, best words, and best information, why would you want to depend on them?
What does this mean? Look at the following leads for the same story, written by two different reporters who covered the end of a trial:
“Facing the possibility of serving in excess of 7 years in prison, Captain Joseph Hazelwood, skipper of the Exxon Valdez, which spilled millions of barrels of crude oil one year ago in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, has been found not guilty of criminal charges relating to inebriation the night his supertanker collided with a reef, and he has been convicted by a jury in a state court in Alaska of just one misdemeanor charge, “negligent discharge of oil.”
Or:
SOT JURY FOREMAN: We the jury find the defendant Joseph Hazelwood not guilty of criminal mischief in the 2nd degree…
NARRATION: Not guilty of any charge except the mildest misdemeanor: “negligent discharge of oil.”
Hopefully it didn’t take you long to infer that the first lead is from a wire story, while the second lead is from our own story for ABC News, at the end of the trial of the captain whose supertanker was involved in the worst oil spill in history. Sure, by the end of both stories, all the same important information was told. But the wire service reporter didn’t have to worry about people hearing his words just once and absorbing them; as a broadcast reporter, I did. So I didn’t write a long complex lead like his, nor try to tell half the history of the disaster in a single lead as he did, and later in the TV story, there were no phrases like “in excess of” or words like “inebriation.”
What’s the Point?
What you already should know by this point in this book is that the style a print writer uses usually doesn’t have a place in broadcasting. What you also need to know is if you lazily lift language verbatim from a print story—either sentences or single words—you run the risk of producing a piece that your audience won’t be able to comprehend. Use the wires (and newspaper clippings) for information, not for language. Make your own decisions. Don’t let another journalist make them for you.
The Final Indispensable Tool
Let’s talk about computers and the Internet. At a pace that would have bedazzled journalists as recently as the early 1990s, a lot of information you’ll need when researching stories not only is available on the Internet, but it’s only available there. Already there are countless books to teach you how to do Internet research, with countless more in the works. So I won’t try to provide chapter and verse.
But I will try to give you the general picture, and it is this: if a plane crashes, you probably can learn virtually everything you want to know—from its maintenance records to the date of the pilot’s last health checkup—on the Internet. If a crime suspect is captured, you can probably learn everything you need to know about his background—from prior criminal history to employment record—on the Internet. You can learn about corporate records, political contributions, property tax obligations, and every word of just about every law.
If you have someone’s phone number and want to learn the physical location, presto, go to an online reverse directory (which allows you to look up an address based on a telephone number). If you have an address and want to know what it’s close to, presto, go to an online maps directory. If you have someone’s Social Security number, go to the Social Security Administration’s web site to find out from that number the state in which it was issued.
There are things that still aren’t online, but wait long enough and they will be.
How to Use the Final Indispensable Tool
You don’t use Internet search engines just to find the cheapest fare to Cabo San Lucas. You also can use them to get yourself started on story research. You might have to ask a search engine to lead you to a government site, but then, once there, the sky’s the limit. It’s just a matter of coming up with the right search terms, or “keywords,” and to achieve that, you need to do just two things:
1. Learn the best ways to take advantage of the search engine you’re using. Unfortunately, search engines don’t have uniform rules; some will have you type search terms (keywords) in quotes; others will have you separate search terms and phrases with the words “and” or “or.”
So the rule to teach you here is to read each search engine’s (and each web site’s) search rules, or help tips. Sometimes they’ll be printed right on the home page; sometimes you’ll have to click on a help page.
2. Use your head. If one search term doesn’t work, try a synonym, a variation.
If you don’t find what you want through search engines (perhaps because you’re not coming up with the right search terms), think about a shortcut. Which means what? Think about the sort of web site that would have the kind of information you need. Then, instead of going through a search engine, try typing in URLs (“www” addresses) that make sense. It doesn’t always work, but it doesn’t always fail, either.
And this final warning: what you learn about search engines today won’t necessarily work well for you tomorrow. Search engine technology and superiority are fluid. The only solution is to be aware of this, and stay up to date.
Forever Changing the Final Indispensable Tool
It would take too many trees to produce the book that definitively lists the contents of the Internet. It keeps growing and changing. The growth is obvious, but the change may not be, so let me give you just this one example: the White House web site. When one president replaces another (such as the succession of George W. Bush after Bill Clinton back in 2001), the old White House web site (reflecting the eight years of Clinton’s presidency) disappears, and a new one (reflecting the ongoing presidency of Bush) takes its place.
Apply this principle to whatever you’re looking for. For example, the online roster of inmates at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet changes, and temporarily relevant information is erased every time an inmate is released or a new one is registered. The online bill of lading for a cargo ship putting in at the port of New York is different for every voyage.
On the other hand, some records are permanent. Vital records, like births, marriages, divorces and deaths, can open the way to a wealth of information about people. Birth certificates, for example, can work wonders. If you find out where or when someone was born, perhaps you can confirm or contradict information you have from another source. Or perhaps you can use it to find out where someone went to school, and who his classmates were, and then, finding them, you can go in a hundred different directions to learn what you need to know.
But be aware of this important caution: the Internet is the ultimate populist tool. This means you must use your discretion about your source of online information, because depending on who provides it, some of it may be inaccurate. So, you shouldn’t accept information as gospel just because it’s on the Internet where anyone can post anything they like. What’s more, if it’s not on the Internet, that doesn’t mean it’s not credible. It just means it’s not online. Think of the Internet as a useful research tool, but not the only research tool!
Also, search engines aren’t the only way to get what you want online. Collections of information known as databases are another indispensable tool for your research. Perhaps the most frequently used online database is called Lexus-Nexus, where you’ll find an abundance of full-length articles previously published in newspapers, magazines, and journals. Some databases require a subscription for occasional use, some require a single-use fee—payable online. The benefit of using a database is that you get access to cumulative and substantive research that others have done before you.
What’s the Point?
The Internet is an indispensable research tool, but there is no single formula for every search. You simply begin by asking, what do I want to know about this person, or this company, or this thing, and what would I need to see to find out? Then you ask, how much do I trust this online source?
An Even More Indispensable Tool: The Interview
Now you’ve read about many sources of information on the printed page and the computer screen. But obviously those shouldn’t be your only tools to hunt down and gather the news. Since a story basically consists of what you’ve seen firsthand and what you’ve learned secondhand, interviews are another tool at the heart of journalism.
When broadcasters refer to an “interview,” they usually mean a conversation between a reporter or anchor and the interviewee, on camera or, for radio, on mike. They usually mean something that might yield sound bites for a broadcast story. But actually, an interview is much more than that, and often much more important.
To fully understand, consider the dictionary definition of the word (see how handy the dictionary is?): “A meeting at which information is obtained from a person.” Hmmm. It doesn’t say anything about an interview being recorded. That’s because in many of the interviews you’ll do, you won’t be using a microphone. Why not? Because sometimes you won’t be looking for a sound bite, you’ll just be looking for information.
Not Every Interview Is a Blockbuster
So what is an interview? It is a conversation in which someone asks questions and someone else gives answers. It is a conversation in which, referring back to that dictionary definition, someone gives information. If you’re doing a story about two trains colliding and you simply call a railroad spokesperson on the phone to get details, you’re doing an interview whether you record it or not. If you show up at the scene of a public protest and you ask a participant what he’s protesting, you’re doing an interview whether you record it or not. If you run into the mayor in a city hall corridor and you ask her about some pending piece of legislation, you’re doing an interview whether you record it or not. You’re asking questions, and someone is giving you answers. Someone is giving you information.
Not surprisingly, the two qualities you need to do a productive interview are the two qualities I emphasized earlier in this chapter: curiosity and persistence.
The Curiosity Factor
Curiosity is critical because even if you personally don’t care about the subject of a story, you must ask yourself what someone who does care would want to know. What would they ask? Those become the questions you ask.
For years, while based in Chicago for ABC News, I had to do a lot of farm stories throughout the Midwest. As a San Francisco native who always had been surrounded by pavement, frankly I knew little and cared less about farms. But time and again, I had to interview farmers about farm price supports from the government, irrigation techniques, the cost of tractors, and the price of wheat.
I could pull it off only because I asked myself, “What would other farmers want to know?” Eventually, by the way, I came to appreciate the intricacies and tribulations of farming, because I came to realize that without it, we wouldn’t have much to eat!
The Importance of Persistence
Persistence is imperative because if your interviewee doesn’t offer a direct answer to your question—or even just an indisputably clear answer (like a law enforcement officer referring to the undefined “hazmat” team that’s on its way to clean up a chemical spill)—you must ask again, and sometimes yet again, until he does, or at least until it’s crystal clear that he won’t!
An example is an interview with the long-time leader of Libya, Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi. Terrorists had just attacked and killed western tourists, including five Americans, who were waiting in line for flights at airports in Vienna and Rome. United States intelligence traced the terrorists to Libya.
Like most major western news organizations, we flew to Tripoli and filed a request to see Qaddafi. After waiting for a few days in the hotel, we got an early Sunday morning call, which went to all western reporters who had come to town: “Be out front with your cameras in fifteen minutes. We are taking you on a tour of the antiquities around Tripoli.”
All four of us from ABC News had seen the Roman ruins on Libya’s coast before, but we knew of the Libyans’ inclination for intrigue. So we went out front and got on the bus. As it turned out, we were the only westerners who did. That persistence paid off handsomely.
After driving out of town, we pulled up next to a field where an arrow-shaped row of tractors was plowing. The lead tractor—at the point of the arrow—had bodyguards holding machine guns running alongside, a pretty sure sign that the Qaddafi was in the driver’s seat.
We ran through the field and sure enough, he was. It obviously was a setup, to show what a “man of the people” Colonel Qaddafi was, but that merely made our story all the more riveting.
Read this exchange near the beginning of the interview, and note the persistence to get a direct answer about Qaddafi’s help for terrorists. Given what he probably was hiding, Colonel Qaddafi may not have fully cooperated, but you can’t say we didn’t try!
DOBBS: You have said one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. How did you or Libya help the “freedom fighters” in Vienna and Rome?
QADDAFI: As I told you, we support the freedom fighters everywhere, particularly our brothers, Palestinians. And we are not responsible for their attacks.
DOBBS: Did they come from here, do you know?
QADDAFI: No. You know, first of all, Palestinians are everywhere, even in America. They may come from America. There are thousands of Palestinians, refugees, are in America. They may come from America. That means Americans are responsible for these attacks.
DOBBS: But did they come from here, is the question. These men, in Rome and Vienna?
QADDAFI: Do you have any evidence?
Dobbs: I’m asking you.
QADDAFI: I ask you also.
Eventually, persistence paid off, not necessarily with an honest answer, but with an answer:
QADDAFI: If they are here they can be my responsibility, but they are not here because they haven’t—if they need, I will give them, I am not afraid … because they are freedom fighters.
This was a case where between what the interviewee said and what he didn’t say, the audience could reach its own conclusions.
Do Not Try This If It’s Not Your Home
For those of you who hope some day to be “foreign correspondents,” always bear in mind one thing. Our Constitution’s First Amendment permits us to ask the most irreverent questions of our highest leaders, but it doesn’t carry any weight beyond our shores. In other words, when interviewing a despot who can easily have you arrested and imprisoned on his whim—or in a broader sense, when breaking a dictatorship’s arbitrary rules in the interest of getting your story—tread cautiously.
What’s the Point?
An interview, whether or not you record it, can yield great information. If you do record it, it can provide a great dynamic too. Plus sound bites, of course!
A Few Tricks to Try at Home
One difference between the unrecorded and the recorded interview is that when you’re recording, you want sound bites. Therefore, if you want to increase your chance of getting exchanges that flow and answers that are usable in your piece, learn these simple rules:
1. Do not ask “yes or no” questions.
If you do, your interviewee may just tell you “yes” or “no.” That may give you the information you need, but it won’t give you the sound bite.
Consider the following questions, and ask yourself which one is more likely to get someone to answer in the form you need:
Were you happy to have your baby before the end of the tax year, so you could take a deduction on her?
Shortest possible answer: “Yes!”
What did you think about having your baby before the end of the tax year, so you could take a deduction on her?
Shortest probable answer: “I was thrilled!”
Or:
Governor, are you going to run for reelection?
Shortest possible answer: “No.”
Governor, what are your reelection plans?
Shortest probable answer: “I’m not running again.”
Maybe you’ll get longer answers with either version of the questions, but your chance of getting one long enough to use as a sound bite is much greater if you phrase questions in a way that makes it hard to answer with just a word or two.
Intent on Silence
If a politician, or an entertainer, or a corporate executive who is used to speaking into microphones is your interview target, and he doesn’t really want to talk, there may not be much you can do. The most amusing story is about President Calvin Coolidge, who was nicknamed “Silent Cal.” It is told that a woman went up to his table at a White House dinner and said, “President Coolidge, I have bet $10 with my friend over there that you will say at least three words to me,” to which Coolidge reportedly responded, “You lose.”
2. Do not prepare for an interview by writing every question in advance.
Having a list of written questions can be fraught with risk. You may be so pre-occupied with asking the next question on your list that it becomes a crutch and you aren’t listening to the answer to the last question. It may cry out for a follow up question you hadn’t planned.
What to do instead? Know before the interview what you want to talk about— a list of what you want to cover won’t hurt—then listen to what the interviewee tells you and let the questions flow from that. Sure, if there’s a key question that absolutely must be asked (like asking Colonel Qaddafi whether he helped the terrorists), by all means be prepared to do so. But once you’re past the beginner’s level of discomfort doing a recorded interview, avoid the “question list.” It can paralyze you if the interview takes an unexpected twist.
One more point on predetermined questions. Often, when you ask someone to sit for an interview, they’ll ask you for a list of the questions you plan to ask. It’s a request you don’t want to fulfill, because if you do, then any other question that logically flows from the conversation may be seen as a violation of the rules. So if someone asks you for a list of questions, tell them something like this: “Well, I don’t actually write my questions down, but I’ll want to ask you about (fill in the blank).”
3. Do not discuss your questions with the interviewee in advance. Why not?
• The interviewee probably will think so hard about how she is going to answer the question—like a rehearsal in the mind—that the answer won’t end up sounding spontaneous or natural.
• If the interviewee already has discussed something with you before the camera or tape recorder was turned on, he will likely answer the second time (when you are rolling for sound bites) with sound bite killers like, “I wanted to strangle him as I told you before but I was afraid I’d get caught.”
• If the subject of the interview has an element of emotion or passion, it’ll come across best the first time it is expressed. If that first time is before you’re recording, well, you’ll be sorry the second time.
These rules apply mainly to “amateur” interviewees, people most likely to feel some nervousness about the process. Politicians, entertainers, business leaders, professional athletes, and others accustomed to microphones and cameras are less likely to freeze up or otherwise foul up. As a general rule though, if you can do the interview without a “pre-interview,” do so.
4. Be thinking about what you want to ask when the interviewee completes an answer—particularly when the interview is live on the air—but don’t work so hard on forming the next question in your mind that you stop listening to the answer itself.
Like the second rule, your interviewee may use a term that requires, for your audience’s sake, that you stop and ask for clarification—“I think the CHP will issue its report by tomorrow.” Huh? The CHP? Ask your interviewee to answer the question again, but to explain what “the CHP” is (California Highway Patrol). Just like “hazmat.”
Or, your interviewee may lay a bombshell at your feet—“Yea, I killed her, but she deserved it”—but if you’re not listening carefully enough, you might miss the opportunity of a lifetime. It happens!
5. Listen for usable sound bites.
This doesn’t mean just listen for clarity and for bombshells, or for sentences too convoluted to be understood. It also means listen for length. You don’t want to sit there staring at your stopwatch while an interviewee is answering your questions, but you have to put that inner “mental stopwatch” to work and be aware of answers that are just too long to use!
So, if you’ve been given a minute and fifteen seconds for your entire story and an interviewee gives you a superb but long answer, it’s perfectly okay to say something like, “That was right on the money, but it probably took too long to use on the air. Would you mind telling me again, but shorter?” Sure, it can be a bit embarrassing, but it’s even more embarrassing if you don’t get a usable sound bite at all.
Ask Before You Ask
Often for radio and sometimes for TV too, you’ll want to record a telephone interview. That’s fine, but be aware of the federal law regarding this: You cannot use someone’s voice on the air unless he has given you permission.
What this means is, you should ask before you start taping an interview whether you have permission to use the conversation on the air. If you forget, you might be able to ask afterwards, but people who have been recorded without being told or asked beforehand are less likely to say yes after the fact. What’s more, in some states retroactive permission is not legal.
And if you’re talking about a live conversation on radio or TV, you have to ask first! If you don’t, and you put someone’s voice on the air without permission and they complain, the Federal Communications Commission can pull your station’s license and, if the violation is egregious enough, put it out of business. Then you, personally, will be out of business for sure.
What’s the Point?
A good writer, journalist, or reporter all need help. It might be reference books, Internet research, or outside sources of information. And it might be one-on-one interviews. Use them all. But without weighing their reliability, don’t depend on any.
What They Call “Investigative Journalism”
Any journalist ought to be able to write a story about a fire, a merger, a ball game, or an election. Just watch, listen, and write. That’s what fills most newscasts.
But what if there are rumors of arson behind the fire? Or embezzlement during the merger? Or illegal steroids on the team? Or bribes during the campaign? How would you find out? By asking yourself a few simple questions: Who might know something? What should I look at? Where should I go? Knowing all that is the difference between reporting and investigative reporting.
Every investigative story is unique. There is no single formula that applies to them all. But there are two qualities that are common to all, and they are the same two that you read about at the beginning of this chapter: use your innate human curiosity, and be persistent! Put yourself in the shoes of the investigator; in fact, be the investigator.
This makes the investigative journalist a theorist. It’s a matter of filling in the holes, and looking for the contradictions. The investigative journalist is dealing not just with what is factual, but with what may not be.
What’s the Point?
A story, any story, is good if:
• It’s accurate (not wrong),
• It’s clear (not confusing),
• It’s dynamic (not boring),
• It’s ready on time (newscasts won’t wait).
An investigative story needs a few more elements, for the benefit of the audience:
• It’s new (this ground hasn’t been broken before),
• It’s important (we care about what you’ve learned),
• It’s exclusive (no one else has told us this).
Exercises to Hone Your Newsgathering Skills_______________
1. Assume you are sent to interview the winner of a $100 million lottery, but because of her nervousness, she says you can ask only two questions, no more. Remember, you want good, long, fun sound bites! What are the best two questions you would ask?
2. You want to conduct a search on the Internet. The question is, how many handguns are in circulation in the United States, and in how many offices and homes? Make a list of at least 10 different keywords you might use to find your statistics.
3. Find out how many inmates are in the prison right now at Joliet, Illinois, with the last name “Jones.” Find out how many (if any) are there with your last name.
4. To refresh yourself on how useful they can be, list five items you’ll find in an almanac that could conceivably be necessary for a news story, and five in an atlas, and five in an encyclopedia, and five in a dictionary.
5. If you’re doing an interview and the subject makes the following statements, write the fol-lowup questions you should ask in response to each:
• “I thought I was going to die until the doctors performed an angioplasty.”
• “I saw one of the two cars that crashed weaving between lanes like the driver was drunk.”
• “We have determined that the plane crashed because of a faulty aileron.”
• “I found so much money in that dumpster that I figured I was set for life!”
6. List all the questions you’d ask if you were assigned to interview the coach of the team that has just lost the Super Bowl.
7. See how much you can learn about yourself on the Internet. Submit a list of facts (generalize if it’s personal).
8. Go to the library. See how much you can learn about yourself, or your family, there. You might be surprised.