Steve Dawson and his Interviewing Techniques

Just recently a famous sports interviewer named Steve Dawson came to our school to teach us about the top 5 rules for conducting an interview.

1. Ask open ended questions.
2. Set Answers free
   1. Don’t set too many parameters
3. Don’t interrupt the interviewee and let them talk.
4. Ask one question at a time. Don’t ask 2 questions in one question.
5. Listen to the answer.

Bonus: When you are interviewing someone famous, don’t be a fanboy.

My first thought about this was how am I going to use this information and how is this relevant to our current unit about writing articles. But thinking about it, If our first talk about how to interview someone would be useful as we would be interviewing other people and using those techniques to our advantage to get the information we need. At the same time, Mr. Dawson also talked about his own experiences from becoming an accountant to a journalist.

But lastly my big takeaway which I think was the best rule about interviewing is being professional and being patient. Being professional gives you the feel of respect and actually doing your job. Giving the interviewee the respect they deserve and something different compared to who they interact with everyday.