Writer's Block

Interviewing a group

Occasionally I'll find myself in the position of conducting a "group interview." Often, the organization or agency I am writing about set up the interview thinking it would be helpful and efficient for me -- all the people I need to talk to there in a room at the same time. But it's actually much more difficult.

The most pressing challenge is remembering every person's name, and making sure that each comment or quote I write down is attributed to the right person. Each time a new person speaks, I need to remember and write down their name before I can start taking notes on what they are saying. I write scrawl my notes incredibly fast to keep up with the conversation, so having to keep track of names shaves precious seconds off the clock.

It's also easy to get so caught up in the interview that I forget to write down a name at all. An otherwise good quote becomes unusable, because now I can't remember who said it. Or much worse, it could get attributed to the wrong person, because my notes now don't indicate that the previous person has stopped speaking and a new voice has taken over.

I once worked on a story about a substance abuse treatment program. I had an appointment to visit the facility, and asked if I could speak with one or two people who had participated in the program. At the appointed time, I was shown into a room, where 10 complete strangers were sitting in a circle. We went around the circle and everyone told me their names. Then they started talking. I think I walked out of there with a migraine.

There are some other reasons why group interviews are less than ideal. It's tough to ask someone a difficult or personal question in front of the group. People end up having to wait a long time for their turn to speak, which slows down the pace and interrupts the flow. And some of the best material comes out of back-and-forth interactions between people, which are hard to capture or translate when it comes time to write the story.

When I do find myself in a group interview situation, there are a few tricks I've learned to make it more manageable. I assign easy code names to each person ("bald," "glasses," "blue shirt"), and worry about matching them up to names later. Or, if I know the person's name, I use initials to make note-taking faster. Whenever possible, I take people separately, turning the group into a series of mini one-on-ones.  And I start a fresh page in my notepad every time a new person starts to speak, so a change in speaker won't get lost in the middle of a page.

But as bad as group interviews may be, there's one kind of interview that's even worse: conference calls.