Talk Straight, Listen Carefully: The Art of Interviewing Book

Interviewing is a vital tool for journalists. In Talk Straight, Listen Carefully, the authors and other seasoned journalists share their interviewing experience and explain how to successfully approach all types of people, extract information, and gain solid material.

Print and broadcast students and journalists will find far more than the standard interviewing tips, including:

• The qualitative differences between “hard news’ interviews and feature or profile story interviews
• Strategies for obtaining hard-to-get interviews
• Methods for managing unwilling, shy, hostile, and fearful sources Techniques for “interviewing on the run”
• Interview-related ethical questions and dilemmas 
• Getting to sources beyond the initial interview 
• Extracting color and human interest from an interview

Booknews

Pocket-size (5x7<">) and pithy, this guide includes tips and anecdotes from seasoned journalists at major US newspapers, magazines, and wire services. Though many of its examples come from the print world, broadcast journalists, too, could take a lesson from it. The text looks at interviewing disasters that reporters learned from as well as successes that led to great stories. Topics include putting sources at ease, conducting e-mail interviews, the differences between interviewing for hard news and features, and logistical and ethical issues, such as how long to keep notes and whether to clean up an interviewee's grammatical mistakes. Both authors teach journalism, Stein at the U. of California, Irvine, and Paterno at Chapman U. in Southern California. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)