Workshop: Interviewing Techniques for Long-form and Investigative Reports

If your purpose in interviewing goes beyond getting a quick quote, then this workshop is for you. It’s about gathering reliable answers and rich detail from human sources.

Typically people don’t give straight answers: They tell you what they have rehearsed, they speak in abstractions, or they evade your questions. First, we will show you how to “scenarise” an interview so that you can predict such moves, and prepare counter-strategies.

In role play you are going to apply techniques that build two key assets:  “the second story”, another name for buried truths; and narratives that can be used to construct powerful scenes.

You will learn to improve your questioning and listening skills, to recognise important signals, and to save the interview when it gets difficult.

This one-day workshop is aimed at journalists, documentarists, story researchers and fact checkers. The emphasis is on background interviews, not on news interviews for TV or radio.

Throughout the day we will be covering:

• What can be the return on interviews?
• What are the best techniques to open people up?
• How to create scenario’s for an interview?
• How to deal with difficult situations?
• Role play and feedback

Mark Lee Hunter and Luuk Sengers are award-winning investigative journalists and interviewers who have worked in print and television. They have helped thousands of professional and student journalists and managers on five continents to improve their questioning skills. They are co-authors of the global benchmark investigative journalism manual, Story-Based Inquiry (UNESCO 2009), as well as The Story Tells the Facts (Logan Handbooks/CIJ 2013) and The Hidden Scenario (Logan Handbooks/CIJ 2012). For more details on these resources please go to www.storybasedinquiry.com and you can also get a free download of following  books (in PDF), “Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists” (UNESCO 2009) and “Power is Everywhere: How stakeholder-driven media build the future of watchdog news” (Stakeholder Media Project 2017).