What questions do you wish you had asked?
I think I pretty much covered it! Although I took longer with the interview than I would have liked (I wanted her to discuss how into theater she was with concrete examples, and I might could have shortened that phase), I don’t feel like I left anything on the table.

What worked well with your approach?
I had an intended beginning, middle, and end. I began with warm-up questions (her name, her major and grade level, how long she’s been a student at UGA, etc.) and introduced my main question (what one of her passions is (she’s a theater enthusiast)), launched into a lengthy middle section in which I got her to describe to me how passionate she was by relating stories from some of her theater exploits, and wrapped it up by asking why she was so passionate and ending the interview at a logical conclusion. As I mentioned above, while my middle section was longer than it could have been (most of those 20 minutes didn’t make it into the podcast’s two-minute time frame), the stories she told a) established that she was indeed a theater buff, and b) rounded things out nicely for the conclusion.

I also did well by making suggestions—during the interview—that would help things later on. It so happens that my lavaliere microphone and recorder’s mic capabilities died a few days earlier (I confirmed with Kelcey’s help before the interview started that that was indeed the case), so I was dependent on my recorder’s stereo recording for everything. Initially she was very animated, waving and clicking a pencil as she spoke, which I feared the recorder was picking up. After she finished her first animated question, I asked her to set her pencil down and explained to her the reason why. She promptly put it down, but then sat on her hands! I told her, “No, don’t sit on your hands! Be animated! Just without the pencil.” We laughed, and although she was stiff initially, as she told me her theater stories, she began to relax and became animated once more. This is the first time I’ve had the guts to correct an interviewee during an interview; in the past I’ve just let it ride—and suffered the consequences. I’m glad I spoke up. The brief awkwardness was worth the improved sound quality. My goal is always to get my interviewee to open up, but at the end of the day, I have to have a usable product (in this case, clear audio).

What could you have done better?
Shortened the middle story-telling section.

Other Comments:
I do have one point of contention. The authors of the two reference articles disagree with each other: one says to go into interviews with a few notes and key ideas instead of written-out questions, while the other says to go in with questions. Who’s correct?

Many of you have stated that you began your “interview postmortem” analysis as soon as you walked out the door. I think I can (somewhat jokingly) say that I began mine during the interview, for one thought I had as we were conversing was “I hope the mic is picking this up ok.” I had tested my mic before we began and I was sure it was recording, but Maryann possesses a voice that is both charming and very soft. I remember feeling uncomfortable with reaching over and adjusting its clip on her collar myself and not wanting to interrupt her by asking her to adjust it. But when I listened to the audio later, I wished I had sucked it up and done at least one of these things (or simply asked her to speak up a bit), because though the audio was certainly usable, there were moments where her voice trailed off towards the end of a sentence that were slightly hard to make out, and my voice sounded louder than hers even though I was not wearing the mic. (I know I’m loud, there’s no need to tease me about it.) So that’s something I wish I had done differently.

As far as content goes, however, I think our interview went well. Perhaps because we found that her passion was in fact a mutual interest, our conversation flowed quite naturally aside from the obligatory stifling of “yeahs” and “mmhmms” that punctuate most non-recorded conversations. I was proud of myself for only getting overexcited and talking over her once. I freely admit that a large portion of my relative success was Maryann herself, who is exceptionally articulate and was handing me gem after gem on a silver platter as far as quotes are concerned. (This actually made it quite difficult for me to cut down the interview to 4 minutes, but I would much rather have to cut down than scramble for material.) I think I asked fairly open-ended questions (“Do you find your thoughts wandering in any particular direction while you work?”) and let her have the final word (I try to conclude every interview with the question “Is there anything you didn’t get the opportunity to say or anything I should have asked you?”). Overall, I would say that the only slight problems I encountered were those relating to recording for an audio piece. Usually I am recording for my own records, so while I try to keep my interruptions to a minimum, it is also not a huge deal if there are coffee cup clinks or faint traffic noises or the occasional “mmhmm” in the background. The next time I record for an audio piece I think I simply need to remember that audio quality is truly paramount and adjust my speech (and my microphone) accordingly.

I find the biggest problem about my record is timing. I interviewed Lisa for about 7 minutes and it was really hard for me to cut it in 4 minutes.

Lisa was a really good interviewee and she provided lots of useful information, but there were still some sentences I thought was not really important. Cutting these sentences was really hard. For example, Lisa may say five sentences to answer one question, but I only need the first and the third sentence. However, if I cut the second sentence, her voice doesn’t sound natural, especially if there is no pause between the second and the third sentence.

Also, we did the interview in MLC. I thought it should be quiet, but there was a guy kept typing when we did the interview. I think the sounds of typing is little bit noisy.

Another problem is that when I record my voice, I didn’t know how to control my breathe, so I had to spend a lot of time to cut these breathiness.

If given another chance, I think I will ask Lisa has she ever talked her passion with her family and do they support her.

As some of our other classmates have noted happened in their experience, I also began engaging in postmortem analysis of my interview with Samantha immediately following the recording session. We discussed together what we thought our strengths and weaknesses were as interviewers, as well as the woes of outside noise. We recorded inside the conference room at The Red & Black and found that every car that passed and, in particular, every motorcycle that passed made a ton of outside noises that were ridiculously loud. Thankfully, we realized this early on and discovered a solution — we would pause immediately upon hearing an engine approaching or would repeat comments if necessary.

During the editing process, I noticed that I used a lot of confirming sounds like “uh-huh” and “yes” that were very distracting and that couldn’t be removed from my final product because they were in the middle or at the tail end of sentences, followed quickly by the continuation of what I had been listening to. In the future, I will be more mindful of this during interviews. Another thing that I noticed, thanks in part to a very helpful comment from our professor, is that my voice is a bit childish. I’ve been working on recording myself speaking in a lower tone, playing around with the way I speak to hopefully come up with a more natural sounding, adult voice.

In terms of questions that I wished I had asked, I wished that I had known ahead of time what Samantha was most passionate about. I didn’t give myself a lot of time to prepare for the conversation. In some ways, that made it more natural. In others, it limited my ability to ask deeper questions about radio, as it isn’t a medium that I’ve worked in extensively. I also wish that I had asked Samantha more about why she seems to prefer college radio over talk radio and differences set those two apart in her mind.

I began engaging in postmortem analysis of my interview with Shelby immediately after leaving our recording session.  My thoughts going into it had been of possible problems with the technology, either in picking up the audio or saving it properly.  Fortunately, there was not catastrophic equipment failure, but I think it threw me off somewhat in the moment.  Besides preoccupation with equipment, the purpose of producing audio for a podcast made the conversation feel somewhat stilted in order to avoid interjecting unwanted sounds into the recording.  No confirming words, not a lot of back and forth, other than head nodding and such.  It did not feel completely natural.

While editing for the audio pod, there were some questions I wished I had asked.  I wished, for instance, that I had asked Shelby to describe the sights and sounds of the locations she visited, beyond noting their relations to literary pieces.  I also wished I had asked her how they compared to mental images she had beforehand and if the realities changed her memories of the stories.

Looking at the tips given by CNN and CJR was somewhat reassuring.  In relation to CNN tips: 1. I did ask mainly open-ended questions; 2. I did not interrupt silences; and 3. I did invite the last word.  In relation to CJR tips: 1. I had prepared myself by reading Shelby’s story of travel to Edinburg, Scotland and had searched the internet for stories about literary travel; 2. I had prepared a list of questions, which I committed to memory but did not reference during the interview; 3. And again, silences were not averted with pointless interjections.  On balance, it was a good learning experience.  My performance was probably not great nor was it terrible.  I thank Shelby for providing interesting material.  And I really liked creating a podcast.  I would definitely tackle it again, hopefully more confident with the technology, and doing a little better next time!