Interview by Email

Personally, I think this is the best form of interview, for the simple reason that you don’t have to ask someone if you can record the conversation, but also because it’s far harder to misquote someone when you have their answers in their own writing.

Email also lets you relax and lay out your interview strategy and the actual questions. In theory, you can do that when speaking live to someone, too, but depending on who you’re interviewing and how confident a person you are in social settings, talking live may muddy the process a bit and leave you flummoxed to the point where your interview quality is significantly affected.

Regardless of how you choose to conduct your interview, because some will no doubt maintain that live is a much better alternative, perhaps because you have a greater chance of catching your subject off guard (a valid point), the advice that follows still applies.

Keep It Simple, But Focused

Ask open-ended questions. This should be self-evident, but if you ask someone a question they can answer with a simple “yes” or “no,” many often will. Instead of crafting an impressive, incisive 25-word question that’ll net you a three-word answer, try to keep your end of things relatively light and allow for plenty of expansion on your interviewee’s part.

But open-endedness can also be a double-edged sword. If you ask too vague a question, you might get a wealth of information, but it might not be useful, pertinent or interesting information. The key is to keep it on point. So, for example, instead of asking “What motivates you?” to someone like Ashton Kutcher when your publication focuses on social media, ask, “What motivated you to become so involved with Twitter to begin with?”

Care to Elaborate?

If your initial interview questions don’t elicit what you were looking for, or one answer in particular takes you in a new and potentially more interesting direction, don’t shy away from contacting your source again for further information. Think of the initial interview as a collaborative first draft process.

An exchange of two or three sets of questions and answers isn’t unusual. I always find it better to do this sort of thing over email, since you don’t have to worry about setting up times for face-to-face meetings or phone conversations for follow-up questions, and you can view the entire threaded conversation in your inbox when you later go to write the article. You could also use IM, but as with phone conversations, always make sure to get your interviewee’s permission before logging the conversation.

Post-interview

There are many ways to conduct a post-interview. The simplest is just to send a thank-you note, along with a publication date for the content that will result, and a promise to follow up with a link when it goes live. Depending on the purposes of the interview you’re conducting, more or less may be required.

If you’re just starting out with a source that you’d like to retain in the future, and who might be sensitive to how they are portrayed, you may want to forward an advance copy of the finished piece so that they can give you input before publication. Generally speaking, this isn’t advisable, though, since it puts too much control in the hands of the person being interviewed. If that person is your company’s CEO, and your piece if for the corporate newsletter, then by all means, forward it for his or her approval first.

Interviewing for the web resembles interviewing for print, but it doesn’t necessarily mirror it. It’s hard to give broad advice when the type of content you’re producing makes such big differences in how you go about the task, but hopefully the advice above gets you off to a good start.

If you have any good interviewing tips, share them below.

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I blogged about a “dream tool” I could use and called it Ticklr, and several WWD readers threw out some possible options of Web tools that actually exist, so I thought I’d try them out.

This is the first of two posts where I’ll test out these tools specifically for creating an online tickler file of potential story ideas.

Instapaper

I was attracted immediately by Instapaper’s uncanny simplicity. Register with your email address, create a password only if you want to, then drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar.

Once you’re set up with the Instapaper bookmarklet, you just click the bookmarklet as you read a blog post or article on a site of interest that you don’t have time to read at that moment and move on to your next task. Then when you have more time and want to skim what you haven’t read, just visit the Instapaper site and voila, headlines to the articles you saved. As you read them, they automatically go to a Recently Read list. If you click the bookmarklet on an article already in your Instapaper, the site automatically updates the save date so it appears higher on the list.

What I really like about Instapaper is that I’ve always found bookmarking articles and blog posts in my browser to be a pain once I want to go through them. And bookmarking sites like del.iocio.us haven’t worked for me when I want to scan content for story ideas.

A little while ago, I remembered an article I didn’t have time to read this morning that someone tweeted about on Twitter. I wanted to read it to get some background for an article I’m writing. At first, I headed to Twitter to try to track down the article link, but then I checked Instapaper just in case I had remembered to file it. And there it was!

Even as I prepared this post, I found Instapaper to be instantly handy. I linked to the Web apps I wanted to review for this post instead of bookmarking them. The next day, I was able to find them on my list of links on the Instapaper site – far easier than if I had bookmarked them. In just a few days, I’m pressing the Read Later button as if I’ve been doing it all my life. Because it works.

Instapaper was created as a side project by a guy working on Tumblr.com, another site I really like but that doesn’t really work as a tickler file to me. A possible downside I can see with Instapaper is scalability, that is, if I don’t go through the articles frequently enough, the list will get really, really long. Being able to sort them by category would be a plus.

Read our previous coverage of Instapaper here.

Notefish

I heard about Notefish from a comment in my Dream Tools post so I figured I had better take a look. After registering, I was prompted to download a Firefox plug-in, restart Firefox, and it added a notefish tagging button right next to my del.icio.us button.

So Notefish takes the concept of saving articles and blog posts and search engine results to another level. All you have to do is highlight the text you want to save, click on the little yellow Notefish on your browser, then add the content to a “Page” you create which essentially is like a category.

I was blown away when I went to Notefish. The post was there, on the page I had created, but not only that, the interface let me move it around by clicking, dragging and dropping it. You can also change the color of each note. I’ve already started a page of notes and research for an upcoming article I’m writing for a women’s business web site.

Okay, so I’m easily impressed, you say. I guess it doesn’t take much to knock my socks off although my sock-removing criteria includes:

1. Must be simple.
2. Must be intuitive.
3. Must be helpful.

Call me a Web apps snob, call me a spoiled Mac user, call me what you want. I know what I like and know why I like it. And so far, I like both of these apps. Two down, three more to go.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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