Interviewing Done Well: Making a Good Story Great

by EMILY KURTZ

Parents forget their children and leave them in the car to die. Not quite the sentence you thought I’d start off with, right? When I think about interviewing done well, my mind always returns to a news story I read a couple of years ago from the Washington Post, titled “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?”

Let’s face it. Whenever you hear a tragic story in the news about a parent who forgot their baby in the car, you think to yourself, “How could someone forget their child like that?” It turns out, this fatal accident is actually quite common, and has more scientific explanation than we think, as uncovered by reporter Gene Weingarten.

Weingarten’s detailed account follows the stories of multiple individuals who accidentally killed their babies by leaving them in the car. I began reading the story with the same scrutiny we all share for these parents, but ended the story with a little more compassion and understanding than I expected.  

Throughout the story, Weingarten provides the perspectives of several devastated parents, including an internationally acclaimed expert in language learning and technology from the University of California at Irvine. He also provides information from a professor of molecular physiology, a non-profit organization lobbyist, a clinical psychologist, and a judge.

When thinking about a story that exemplifies the tenets of original reporting and interviewing, this one takes the cake! Weingarten uses most, if not all, of the techniques Dear and Scott (2015) outline in their chapter “Who Gets the Spotlight?” Weingarten allows the parents to defend themselves, he interviews a wide variety of primary sources including experts and those affected by the issue, and he lets the interviews and contacts he makes guide the direction of the news story.

One technique that really sticks out to me, discussed by Wyss in Covering the Environment (2019), is the establishment of a rapport with your interviewee. Weingarten had to sit down and have challenging conversations with devastated parents to gain information for his story, and he must have had to establish a relationship with them to dig so deep into such a horrifying topic. When thinking about my own journalistic stories in the future, I doubt that I’ll be covering as intense of a topic as Weingarten covers, but I will be aiming to use the same amazing interviewing techniques to capture a different set of intense issues; environmental issues.

Sources:

Dear, J., and F. Scott. 2015. The Responsible Journalist: An Introduction to News Reporting and Writing. Oxford University Press. Print.

Wyss, B. 2019. Covering the environment: How journalists work the green beat. New York: Routledge. Print.

Weingarten, G. 2009. Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? The Washington Post. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e >Accessed October 2, 2019