Literary Journalism On Trial Book

This book probably deserves four stars if you're a journalist or a journalism student. It is chock-full of useful information about how to obtain and conduct an interview, usually with a prominent person, to write an article for a newspaper or a magazine.

So it's probably unfair for me to give it two stars. But as a layman non-journalist, a lot of it just wasn't geared toward me. I may periodically need to interview subject matter experts professionally or for background for my fiction writing. I read samples of several books about interviewing to see which might be the most useful to me. A lot of them seem to be about interviewing politicians or rock stars. But this one seemed the most applicable and insightful about the general conduct of interviews.

There were a lot of good suggestions about how to persuade unwilling subjects to undergo an interview. I also liked the suggestions about how to organize questions and build rapport with your interview subject. The pros and cons of taking notes or recording subjects is still relevant. Brady's suggestion to have your interview subject review your transcript for accuracy, not for approval, prior to publication is probably a very wise and sound policy.

There were lots of fun anecdotes too about interviews that went really well and those that went wrong. Even though this book is dated, you'll recognize the references to people like Barbara Walters and Henry Kissinger.

A good read. But I'm still waiting for somebody to write THE book on how to conduct basic informational interviews for the purposes of research.