The Importance Interview Research

The importance of research before an interview: 

as an interviewee it’s really important to know all the context of the person and the subject of the interview, this is because this will help the interview flow a lot better meaning that when you ask questions to the interviewer they’ll know what to say.

The questions are the key point in an interview and it’s important for them to be quite short and quite straight forward as well as easy to understand as that will make it a lot easier for the interviewee to answer the questions.

The list of journalistic contexts: print, television, radio, online, news, sport, editorial and feature write ups.

Definitions of the journalistic contexts:

News - Interviews which are on the news are mainly investigative and the usual topics of the interviews are generally with: police, eye witnesses, members of the public, politicians and sometimes people in the area from where a new story is based. The news interviews to inform us about other opinions and facts. They are presented formally.

Sport - Football matches and tournaments etc all have interviews before the beginning of them and this is to show how people feel before the event and what their predictions may be about the game this gives us audience some general background information to help us understand what they feel and we then get a good grasp of the atmosphere. The presenters before matches sometimes predict what they think the outcome will be like of the events to allow the audience to gain an insight to their opinions. After the events usually interviews with the winning team will take place so the audience can gain an understanding to their feelings at that patellar moment.

Radio - Radio interviews have a lot of wide range topics there are entertainment interviews on radio shows such as the radio channel radio 1 and then there are documentary radio interviews on Radio 4 for an example. Some interviews for the radio are done in the radio studio itself and that can be over the phone or online. It is very important to introduce the interviewee on the radio very clearly as no one can see who the interviewee is before the interview.

Online - The internet has a lot of different websites where you can find interviews. Print pieces of interviews can be found online as magazines and newspapers now have their own websites where these interviews can be read on there. Television programmes also have their own online websites where you can find interviews that have been placed online for catch up e.g. on BBC iPlayer which lots of people use. There are also a lot of websites where interviews can be posted on to the internet like through YouTube channels and sometimes people even put interviews up through their personal blog sites.

Print - In magazines and newspapers you can find print interviews, these interviews are the same style as other interviews but the difference is that it is wrote into the newspaper/magazine. A print interview will have the questions written down and the answer to the question will be right after it. The print interviews have different themes and can include reports, hard news, straight forward and editorial. Most print pieces pieces of the interview will be around the page in catchy bold font and in bold colours this is because it will grab the readers.

Television - There are lots of interviews that are shown on television. Hard news and investigative interview techniques are used for political interviews which are mainly shown on the news. Entertainment interviews are shown on the Graham Norton Show or on Alan Carr's chatty man, however some interviews are not as hard hitting or as amusing because you can get personal emotional interviews on T.V too that are emotional for the interviewee's and as well as the audience for example the programme Piers Morgan's life stories focuses on issues which can be quite personal.