It’s a core skill for journalists, but few reporters receive enough formal training on the interview process.
On July 22, three veteran journalists spent an hour talking about interviewing and the techniques they have developed. These experts shared their tips and discussed everything from phone interviews and interviewing reluctant subjects to whether the presence of a PR person in the same room as the source should alter a journalist’s approach.
Listen to the call: ConferenceRecording-1061611-937298
Moderator:
Mary Jane Pardue is Interim Department Head and professor of journalism in the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Missouri State University. She is a longtime member of SABEW and serves on the Board of Governors and co-chair of the Training Committee. She also has served on the SABEW Task Force on Membership/Recruiting and Mentoring, the Education Committee Task Force on Diversity and as a judge for the Best in Business awards. Over the years, she has served on panels and moderated a number of training conference calls and sessions at SABEW conferences.
Mary Jane is committed to improving the skills of business journalists both through SABEW and the business reporting class she teaches at Missouri State. She has more than 25 years’ experience as a journalist and teaches several reporting and writing classes as well as media ethics. Before going to Missouri State, she was business editor at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. She also worked at the Nashville Banner and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. She has published academic research on the training student journalists need to cover business. She has also researched newspaper ownership and management and is the author of Who Owns the Press? Investigating Public vs. Private Ownership of America’s Newspapers. Mary Jane holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in English.
Speakers:
Jacqui Banaszynski holds the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism and is on the visiting faculty of The Poynter Institute. She has worked as a reporter and editor for more than 30 years, most recently as associate managing editor of The Seattle Times, where she was in charge of special projects and staff development. She spent 18 years as a beat and enterprise reporter, then worked as a projects editor at newspapers in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. While at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, her series “AIDS in the Heartland” – an intimate look at the life and death of a gay farm couple – won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and a national SPJ Distinguished Service Award.
Diana Henriques the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust,” is a contributing writer for The New York Times, where she has worked since 1989. She was previously a staff writer for Barron’s magazine, a Wall Street correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and an investigative reporter for The Trenton (N.J.) Times. In 2005, she was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and won a George Polk Award, the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting and Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for her 2004 series exposing insurance and investment rip-offs of young military consumers. She was also a member of The New York Times team that was a Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of the 2008 financial crisis. Diana is on SABEW’s Board of Governors.
Lorene Yue is a reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business covering higher education, consumer products and restaurants. She has been a business reporter for the Chicago Tribune, covering retail and personal finance. In addition, Lorene has worked for the Detroit Free Press, the Kansas City Star and the (Hamilton, Ohio) Journal-News. She is a member of the Asian American Journalists Association, a fan of Rock Band and Ultimate Frisbee.
To read Lorene’s award-winning piece on local businesses in Austin dealing with crime, visit Crain’s Chicago Business here.
For more information on “Interviewing Techniques from the Pros,” contact Mary Jane Pardue, mjpardue@missouristate.edu or 417-836-8834.
Presented as a member service by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
