Interviewing for profiles

This is a photograph of Oriana Fallaci, one of the best interviewers who ever lived. Oriana was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A former partisan duringWorld War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career.

She interviewed many internationally known leade

rs and celebrities such as the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, Willy Brandt, Zulfikar Ali

Bhutto, Walter Cronkite, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Federico Fellini,Sammy Davis Jr, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasir Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Alexandro

s Panagoulis, Archbishop Makarios III, Golda Meir, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, Haile Selassie, Sean Conn

ery and Lech Wałęsa.

A little inspiration, I hope, to interview someone you admire or find fascinating, or evil!, this week.

Tips: tell the person you have a half an hour to an hour for the interview (up to you.)

Be sure to start ending it, 15 minutes before you've said you will. In other words, say something like, "I just want to let you know we have only 15 minutes left."

People do better with limited time, than feeling like it's open-ended.

If you don't know where to start, ask what were the turning points in a person's life, career, or thought process. What was the most dramatic moment of their life, the moment that makes them who they are.

The best interviewers are challenging as well as sympathetic. If you challenge a person, they are likely to speak more strongly about what they believe in.

Try to get people to tell you stories...Then tell theirs.

When you write it up, you CAN change their words a little to make them sound better. In other words, you CAN make their sentences flow, cut out ums and run on phrases. Tighten it up.

In terms of using their words, you only want to use quotes when the quotes are exceptionally strong and say it better than you can say it in your narrative about them. Try to write a profile, a short one, not a q and a.

You might refer to the New Yorker again to see how it's done when it's done as well as it can be done.