I'm sitting at my desk with the printed off transcripts of interviews, research, several pens and a large mug of coffee. My Firefox has about 10 tabs open at this point and I'm pulling down research details from various sites that I've bookmarked, getting the minutiae I want for the sections of my article.
I'm taking a break from writing the article, and dealing with sorting through the interviews, because I need to finish the blog entries for my C.A.R. class, and also because I need a break from the article itself and because my head hurts. (Too much coffee, perhaps?)
I need to shut off my phone and focus on producing a new outline with the stuff I've gotten back recently and then start putting what I've got into the skeletal structure of the new outline. What I really need to have done at the end of the day is a somewhat fleshed out article and sidebar with notes as to what else I need to make it complete. This shouldn't be too difficult, it's just going to be time consuming.
I think I'll go turn off my cell phone and brew some more coffee.
But, before I do that, I need to get inspired...end-of-the-semester-itis is setting and and it's a nice day. I want to go for a walk. The hockey playoffs are going on and the Pens dusted the Habs, 6-3, last night. The Bruins/Flyers game is on right now and I wouldn't mind watching that, either. But this is what I do. I love to write and so I'm going to write.
Inspiration:
Saturday, May 1, 2010
I Greatly Dislike E-Mail Interviews
I like doing live interviews...I've never had a problem with it, it just sort of seems natural to me. Like meeting someone new and, since I moved every 3-4 years since my dad was in the Air Force, I got pretty good at meeting new people.
My basic philosophy is to prepare as much as I can for the notice given to me. Since I'm on the radio, many times I'll simply get the "So-and-so is coming up to the studio in 15 minutes and you're going to interview them live on air." The first time I did this I was very, very nervous...in fact, every time I interview someone I'm nervous, probably more nervous than they are, but I also enjoy it and I think I'm pretty good at it...though nowhere near as good as I'd like to be.
That said, being in school and not having the resources to record phone conversations, video conference with people in a way that can be archived (as it stands now, I cannot find any way to record Skype video chats on my MacBook...boo, open source community, boo) kind of leaves me with only one option, since I'm interviewing people from all over the country: e-mail interviews, because there's no way the J-school is going to send me all over the country...though I wish they would.
E-mail interviews just plain SUCK, there's no other way around it, they are horrible. I hate writing questions for them because I try to write them in the way that I would actually say them, were I interviewing the person live, and that just doesn't work...especially since I have a habit of only putting main points down on my notes when I'm going to interview live and that makes it hard to translate into full questions for people to answer over e-mail.
It's much easier to follow up on questions in live interviews, to redirect or change what you're trying to ask to get at what you're wanting to know...ugh, you have to send three or four e-mails sometimes to get what you're after because the people being interviewed don't understand what you're trying to ask...which brings me to the phrasing.
I feel as though my phrasing is off in e-mail interviews and they don't really represent my true personality. (Which makes me feel like a total jackass when I'm interviewing people whose work I've been reading for a while, and whom I respect, like Sarah Jaffe and Alyx Vesey.)
Eh...whatevs. It's like Frank Sinatra says, "That's life."
My basic philosophy is to prepare as much as I can for the notice given to me. Since I'm on the radio, many times I'll simply get the "So-and-so is coming up to the studio in 15 minutes and you're going to interview them live on air." The first time I did this I was very, very nervous...in fact, every time I interview someone I'm nervous, probably more nervous than they are, but I also enjoy it and I think I'm pretty good at it...though nowhere near as good as I'd like to be.
That said, being in school and not having the resources to record phone conversations, video conference with people in a way that can be archived (as it stands now, I cannot find any way to record Skype video chats on my MacBook...boo, open source community, boo) kind of leaves me with only one option, since I'm interviewing people from all over the country: e-mail interviews, because there's no way the J-school is going to send me all over the country...though I wish they would.
E-mail interviews just plain SUCK, there's no other way around it, they are horrible. I hate writing questions for them because I try to write them in the way that I would actually say them, were I interviewing the person live, and that just doesn't work...especially since I have a habit of only putting main points down on my notes when I'm going to interview live and that makes it hard to translate into full questions for people to answer over e-mail.
It's much easier to follow up on questions in live interviews, to redirect or change what you're trying to ask to get at what you're wanting to know...ugh, you have to send three or four e-mails sometimes to get what you're after because the people being interviewed don't understand what you're trying to ask...which brings me to the phrasing.
I feel as though my phrasing is off in e-mail interviews and they don't really represent my true personality. (Which makes me feel like a total jackass when I'm interviewing people whose work I've been reading for a while, and whom I respect, like Sarah Jaffe and Alyx Vesey.)
Eh...whatevs. It's like Frank Sinatra says, "That's life."
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