Conquering Your Rosetta Stone Interview: A Comprehensive Guide

BRISTOL, Conn. — I was at a great event Sunday afternoon. Host of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross, was at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia to talk to Questlove, co-founder of Roots and a percussionist. Questlove is a terrific talker, and his responses were uniformly interesting. He had much to say about Prince, whom he had known, and Questloves father, doo-wop legend Lee Andrews. Yet I found myself too often hung up on Gross questions.

And it makes sense: I had just come back from spending almost a week learning from John Sawatsky, who is the world’s best interview expert.

The interview process has been studied by Sawatsky for a long time, and he thinks that many journalists do it wrong by asking too many closed-ended questions instead of ones that get people to give more information.

In Sawatskys view, too many interviewers are more interested in hearing themselves talk than in framing effective questions. He told his trainees not long ago, “There is only one star in an interview, and it’s not you.” “.

The senior director of talent development at ESPN, Sawatsky, is a fierce enemy of the closed question, the attitude-filled question, and the interviewer statement. After listening to Sawatsky, you will never watch interviews the same way again, whether you are a news consumer or a news worker.

Stephen Curry is to the jump shot what Sawatsky is to the interview. Monet is to Impressionist painting what Prince is to pop music. The difference is that Sawatskys artistry emerges not in his own work but through that of his acolytes.

The expert on interview techniques used to be an investigative reporter in his home country of Canada. Now, he is in high demand as an interview consultant for media companies. Back in 2000, when I was editor of American Journalism Review, Susan Paterno, a senior writer, told her to write about him. That’s how I first heard of him.

She did, and I was fascinated by Sawatskys approach, portrayed so vividly in Paternos article.

I wasnt the only one. The same was true for ESPN executive John Walsh, who was moved to bring Sawatsky to the TV sports giant after reading Paternos’s article. He started as an outside trainer in 2002 and became a staff interviewing coach in 2004. So, years after the AJR article, Sawatsky invited me to watch as he trained 11 ESPN employees at the company’s campus in Bristol, Conn.

Sawatsky is fond of saying interviewing isnt rocket science, and it is true. Much of his approach is based on common sense, albeit common sense that is all too frequently ignored.

The guru punctuates his preaching with clips of interviews, many by famous TV personalities, that go terribly wrong. Frequent targets include Larry King, Barbara Walters and a panoply of 60 Minutes mainstays. And the clips bring home the message.

Sawatsky uses the excerpts to draw attention to his seven deadly sins: questioner bias and comments; double-barreled questions; questions that aren’t really questions; overloaded questions; trigger words (“botched”); exaggeration and hyperbole; and the closed question, which is his favorite.

Over and over, he shows how the sins stop or slow down what started out as an honest and promising interview. Too often, the interviewer is getting in the way of the interview.

Sawatsky, 67, says that the best way to get the most information is to ask open-ended questions, like those that start with “what,” “how,” or “why” and are meant to get details and descriptions; questions that are neutral in tone; and questions that lean There are times when closed questions are OK, but not all that many.

One of the most telling parts is when Sawatsky puts together two interviews: one with a man who was attacked by a beaver and one with a man who was attacked by a bear. In both cases the interviewees are good talkers. But one interview is riveting, the other a choppy affair that never realizes its potential.

The reason? In interview one, the questioner keeps things moving with a “what happened next?” approach. In the other, the interviewer smothers the conversation with tangents and off-target interjections.

Sawatsky thinks that one part of the problem is that many well-known TV interviewers have built their careers by showing off their personalities. That can lead to the overstuffed questions and out-of-place assertions that are the enemies of the interview.

Also, Sawatsky says not to ask questions that sound tough but are easy for the person being interviewed, like when Barbara Walters asked Vladimir Putin if he had killed anyone. Nope, Putin replied breezily, and that was that.

A better bet, the guru says, is to listen closely to the answers and pounce on opportunities. If the athlete who is being charged with bad behavior says that he has made mistakes but is not guilty of the charge, you should ask, “What mistakes?”

Sawatsky’s goal is to change the way interviews are done. He says he has been lucky to have strong support from ESPN since he started working there more than ten years ago. While I was at the sports giant, Sawatsky’s boss, Jack Obringer, told him about a recent large-scale ESPN interview that had only one closed question.

Now, the interview man has to find time in his training schedule to write a book about how he does his job.

That Questlove interview with Terry Gross was fine, but I think the lead singer of The Tonight Show band could give a great interview without a host. Plus, if you see Questlove, don’t forget to ask him about the late-night ping-pong match between Prince and Jimmy Fallon at Susan Sarandon’s ping-pong saloon the night after Fallon died.

Rosetta Stone Interview