I was watching a show on Netflix or Hulu or possibly HBO Max the other night and was treated to a scene involving a news reporter interviewing the father of a missing girl.
The interview was conducted in the lost girl’s bedroom and the father was expressing himself at length about the last time he had seen his daughter. The man spoke with real passion, rage and desperation and the whole time, the reporter just sat there on the edge of the bed, nibbling her pencil eraser and nodding indifferently.
“Why the hell are you not writing this down?” I yelled at the TV, rising to my feet so that the actress could better hear me. “Why are you not recording this, you bonehead eraser nibbler, because everything this man is saying is pure interview gold!”
The on-screen actress didn’t listen to me. They never do.
As the interview went on, she just looked more and more bored and seemed entirely unhappy with what the grieving father had just given her.
I would have yelled some more at the TV, but really — this happens all the time in television depictions of a news interview. The reporter always has a notebook in hand, but apparently it’s only use is to fan oneself because it always seems to be scorching hot during scenes like this.
It drives me nuts. Does Amy Adams (the lass who played the reporter in this scene) really not get how rare and wonderful it is when a reporter’s subject really starts to open up? It doesn’t happen a lot, Amy, so if I don’t see you scribbling furiously in that soggy notebook of yours, I’m gonna stop telling people how great you were in “The Fighter.”
One-on-one interviews may not be the meat and potatoes of a news story, but they are definitely the carrots and peas. And a reporter can usually tell in the first few seconds if he’s going to come away with pure Pulitzer treasure or monosyllabic dung.
“So, Mr. Jones,” you’ll begin. “You’ve been accused of embezzling millions from your company, your family left you and now there’s an investigation open into the disappearance of your dog groomer. How do you feel about all of this upheaval in your life?”
Mr. Jones nods ever so faintly. He rubs a hand down his unshaven face and says: “Sucks.”
A reporter can sometimes coax something more genuine and emotive from a reticent subject, but you end up resorting to leading questions and I just hate leading questions.
I’ll bet you hate leading questions too, don’t you?
The easiest interviews of them all are those conducted at the scene of mayhem. Stand before a burning building and ask Joe Schmoe for his thoughts on the tragedy and pure adrenaline will turn him into the most articulate fellow on the block. He can’t help himself. His heart is thumping, his thoughts are racing and the words that fly out of his mouth themselves seem to be on fire.
But give a guy too much time to think about what he’s going to say to you, the hardworking and handsome reporter, and he’ll edit his words so much he ends up sounding like a walking, talking news release.
This is particularly troublesome in the business world. Ask a fellow for a few simple words about his upstart hula hoop shop and he turns into Jeff Bezos before your eyes. And ears.
“We’re taking a deep dive into the prevalent paradigm and seeking to change the existing framework to better accommodate an emerging subset of ideas pertaining to the actionable items and bleeding edge concepts already within our core competencies,” he’ll tell you, because dang it, you gave him the whole afternoon to ponder his remarks. “It may take us considerable time to move the needle, but I think over time, the synergy that exists within our foundational structure will gain real traction and in the end, we’re really going to peel back the onion and you’ll see profound results, particularly in the piggyback sector of the tongue and groove market.”
I always need to ask a follow-up question after interviews like this and that follow-up question is always: “What?”
A good interview can turn a mediocre story into a narrative that really pops. This is particularly true when a poor slob of a reporter is condemned to write an obit feature — that is, a story about a notable person who has died.
When you’re writing a story of such a sensitive and important nature, you tend to get the same old lines over and over. You can understand why. When talking about dead folks, people are very careful. They don’t want to go out on a limb and say something that might be deemed disrespectful (that’s how you get ghosts) so they play it safe by throwing innocuous cliches at you.
Interview a bunch of people about a dead notable and you will hear many times that he had a smile “that lit up a room.” You will hear that he was the kind of guy who “would give you the shirt off his back,” and that the dearly departed “cared deeply about the community.”
The good news is that you will usually run into one or two people who either knew the deceased particularly well or who have had enough after-work cocktails to loosen their tongues.
“Let me tell you something about this man,” they will say, poking you in the chest to make their point. “Todd could spit tobacco farther than any man I ever met. He took in stray cats off the streets, picked up hitchhikers wherever he saw them and would never say no if you asked him to help you move. A real great guy. Talented. Ol’ Todd did a mean Johnny Cash on karaoke night and he cooked the best frittata omelet you’ve ever tasted.”
I love interviews like this. By the end of them, I feel like I knew Todd as a person, not just as a public figure who was always giving people shirts. It makes for a nicely rounded story for our readers and so everybody wins.
Except maybe for Todd, who is still dead.
Every now and then I’ll have an invigorating interview with someone about this or that. He or she will rapid fire colorful comments and rich detail about the story at hand, whether it’s some crime drama or political intrigue. I’ll jot down every single word — unlike that dumb Amy Adams — scribbling so fast that my notebook practically catches fire.
And then come those dreaded words at the very end of the interview: “By the way,” they will say, without a hint of irony, “all of that was off the record.”
It just makes you want to weep.
These days, so many comments from sources come in the form of emails, text messages and (God help you) Facebook comments where one has to wade through goofy emoticons and insipid internet abbreviations (lol) to find the words of substance. And email or text comments seldom feel as natural or as genuine as those passed during a one-on-one interview conducted in the shadows of a parking garage or down some back alley along Park Street.
The quality of an interview can make or break a news story, so it pains me to see those dingy TV reporters acting like the words don’t matter and leaving their notebook pages empty. Although I do admit that some of the things I yelled at Amy Adams on that recent night may have been over the line and for that I do apologize.
It was all off the record, by the way.
Mark LaFlamme is an award winning reporter who has tons of notebooks full of stuff that people have told him over the years.
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