Your Favorite Part of Reporting?

I hate hitting the send button on a good story. That's when I start worrying.

 

Well it ain't the writing part for me, since I'm doing that now and not having fun.

I like preparing my questions. If you've done your research well and (an underrated part) order the questions properly, the interview will go well. If you half-ass this, it shows. Naturally you have to know when to go off the track, but you cannot over-prepare when it comes to knowing what you want to ask.

 

I don't prepare my questions.

Before I go into a big interview, I make a note of one or two questions I can't forget to ask and then I wing it. I do it this way to make it feel like a conversation. I want to ask the appropriate question at the appropriate time, not because it's the next on the list. (sometimes I'll star a certain answer if I want to ask a follow up question but they won't quit talking)

And then, when it's all over and I can't think of anything else, I check and see whether I already got the answers to the questions I needed to ask. Usually I do.

But to each his/her own.

 

What he said.

 

I miss game stories.

Insightful, well-crafted game stories.

The phone tag, cultivating sources, creating breakouts ... I do not miss that at all.

It's probably good I moved to the desk.

I miss reporting 14 days a year ... 14 Friday nights in the fall.

 

Making an impact on people's lives.
- Raising awareness
- Informing
- Teaching
- Exposing
- Helping
- Sharing some experience — of one or many — that will move people to do something they haven't done before. And that could be as simple as thinking.

 

I enjoy the challenge of trying to find an angle, a reason why people would want to read about a girls lacrosse game between two 2-13 teams.

And like others have said, I enjoy the deadline. The pressure is sometimes enormous, but it's exciting to step up to the plate and come up with the best writing that you can in a limited time frame.

 

Face-to-face interviews are the best, especially the ones that involve significant amounts of just shooting the shit with someone steeped in expertise, time spent just chatting before I even pull out the pen and pad/recorder. Hate phoners. Would much rather go out and talk to someone, get them in their environment and see how it reflects them, see how they react in it especially if I've seen them elsewhere.

 

I'm the same way. It's a lot easier to paint the picture if you're actually there and not trying to "fake" it.

 

I prefer face-to-face also, but any time you can build rapport with someone helps the story.

Actually, one of my best stories about building rapport with a source came partly from the source. We were shooting the shit in a phoner when he mentioned the Over The Hill Gang. Since I'm a big Redskins fanboi looser, I really enjoyed the reference. I ended up getting some great quotes from him in a story that went from being a lame one based solely off press releases to one where I got quotes from four different people. In other words I helped get something decent out of sheer crap. And all because this source mentioned the Over The Hill Gang to a guy who was just conceived when George Allen led his charges in Super Bowl VII.

 

I remember preparing questions the first time I had a major, one-on-one interview. When it came time to ask questions, I didn't ask most of them.

Like you all have said, I enjoy doing some research and making note of what I find, but I only prepare 2-3 questions if I do any at all. I find it much easier to go through the interview, get into a flow and have a conversational tone develop. And the interviewee gets into it much more too, especially if you're not flipping through your notebook trying to find the questions you wrote down.

 

The groupies.