LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Online interviews have gained a fairly recent popularity in my line of work. Yes, the technology that supports it has been there for a long time, but it has been employed mostly in interviews with respondents who were overseas. Today, with a prescribed one-meter distance between two persons being the inconvenient norm, online interviews have become an expedient. But don’t expect a video call; audio is the less intrusive preference that takes care of whatever state of work-from-home-undress both parties may be in.
Even more popular are email interviews, which aren’t any better, if not worse, than the online variety. At the height of the lockdown, this became the standard for obtaining answers to an interview. You dispatch a set of well-thoughtout questions without any guarantee that it will yield thorough and satisfactory answers. In fact, what you might get instead are short, vapid statements for questions that you hoped would elicit a load of insights for your story. When I asked a managing director if he would carry out his planned expansion into a new market given the circumstances we were in, he gave me an unelaborated “No” and missed a chance to warm up to his audience and let them into the wonderful way his head works. Not being physically present to press for details or armwrestle a clarification, I ended up working with what little I got. Forget about sending follow up questions: my interviewee had already taken two weeks to answer; another round of emails would have set me way past my deadline.
Equally problematic is receiving the convoluted answer which will send you second-guessing your interviewee’s intention at every turn. Never mind bad grammar and syntax — you can untangle those knots eventually with some hard work and luck — but when it comes to faulty logic you have little recourse but to drop big chunks of the written response. And then there is the cut-andpaste. I once received extra-long passages that were clearly lifted from the company website, and I had no choice but to make them to work as answers to some of my questions. This was totally unnecessary because I have trawled the said website for background information before I even formulated my questions.
There is also the good old telephone — but it only works in brief, fact-checking interviews. You may hear the answers from the other end, but you are bound to get distracted by what’s in your immediate surroundings, and the tedium of taking down notes. I recently did one – and failed. I turned the speaker on, but I could sense that there was something missing in our exchanges. There is a good amount of face reading during interviews, an important skill that allows journalist a reasonable reading of the information he or she receives. Back in the day when faceto-face interviews were the norm, one could accurately color any answer from a subject by injecting their facial expressions. Was it a simple “Yes” or was there something behind the pursing of the lips that followed?
You can imagine my excitement over the prospect of conducting face-to-face interviews again. Vaccinated, rejuvenated, and eager to have a go at animated — even challenging – exchanges, I can’t wait to break down the meaning of an imperceptible smirk that might accompany an answer, or a conspiratorial smile that substitutes a “No”. You can’t do that with an email interview.