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."
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