The Prepared Interview
An interview is designed before it is held: research the subject until your questions prove it, script open-ended questions, and order them easy to hard — the hardest held for the end. · 10 min
You get fifteen minutes with a source who did not have to say yes. Within two questions, she will know whether you did the reading — and she will decide how frank to be accordingly. An interview is not a conversation that happens to be recorded; it is a designed sequence of questions, built before you arrive. This folio covers the three parts of that design: research, phrasing, and order.
Guess before you learn
You have fifteen minutes with a hospital director about a ward that closed abruptly. Which question do you ask first?
The easy, factual question comes first. It settles the room, confirms details you will need anyway, and gets the director talking in specifics. If you reached for the accountability question, most people do — it feels like courage — but it belongs at the end, where an ended interview costs you nothing. The yes/no and the vague invitation each earn one word and a shrug.
9–12
3–5
A closed question can be answered in one word — “Did it hurt?” “Yes.” An open question asks for the story: “What happened when you fell?” Reporters write open questions, because a story carries facts that a yes or a no leaves out.
Write your questions down before the interview, then put them in order: easiest first, hardest last.
6–8
Preparation has three parts. Research: read what has been published, pull the records, learn the dates — so no question spends time on what is already public, and every question quietly proves you did the work. Phrasing: open-ended forms — “what happened,” “walk me through it” — that ask for an account rather than a confirmation. Order: easy and factual first, hardest last.
The order is a method, not a courtesy. Early questions produce detail and ease; the hard question lands after the subject has been talking freely — and if the interview ends right there, everything else is already in the notebook.
9–12
Question types are tools. Open questions collect the account. Closed questions pin single facts — “what date?” “how many?” Hypotheticals explore thinking but rarely produce printable answers. The accountability question puts a documented finding to the subject directly and asks for a response. Most interviews run as a funnel: open at the top, precise at the bottom, accountability at the end.
Draft the accountability question word for word before you go, and ask it as drafted. Precision is fairness — the subject must know exactly what is being put to them — and a precisely asked question is far harder to answer with a speech about something else.
K–2
Before you ask the crossing guard about her job, learn her name and how long she has worked the corner. People say more when your question shows you looked first.
Ask the easy questions first: her name, her corner, her mornings. Save the hard question for the end, when talking feels easy.
Undergrad
Survey methodology's rules transfer whole. Avoid double-barreled questions — two askings fused into one, so the answer attaches to neither. Avoid leading premises (“how bad was the chaos?” presumes the chaos). Avoid vague quantifiers; ask for numbers. One question, one fact. And know the genre: an information interview optimizes for the subject's knowledge, an accountability interview for their response to evidence, on the record.
Order is also an evidentiary strategy: early factual answers commit the subject to a timeline before the hard question arrives, so later evasions have something fixed to be measured against.
Postgrad
The investigative-interviewing literature arrived at the same design. The PEACE framework — planning, engage, account, closure, evaluation — rests on the finding that free-recall prompts elicit fuller and more accurate accounts than cued yes/no questioning, and that confrontation degrades everything that follows it. Journalism's easy-to-hard funnel is the same result, discovered on deadline.
Practice adds the no-surprises rule: every allegation to be published is put to its subject, in specific terms, with time to respond. Scripting the accountability question verbatim is therefore documentation as much as tactics — your record must show precisely what was asked, and precisely what went unanswered.
open-ended question
A question that cannot be answered with yes or no — it asks the subject for an account: “what happened,” “walk me through it.”
Why is this true?
Why does the hardest question go last and not first?
Because the early, easy questions produce detail, ease, and a committed timeline — and because a subject who ends the interview on the final question has already given you everything else. Asked first, the same question can cost the whole interview.
One honest exception to easy-first. The funnel assumes a subject you may see again, or at least keep for twenty minutes. When you have neither — a doorstep encounter, a source stepping into a car, one phone call that will not be returned — invert the design and ask the essential question first. Building ease takes time, and time is the one thing you do not have. When there is nothing left to lose, spend the only question you may get on the thing you came for.
Script the accountability question, word for word — the steps fade as you master them
The county audit, dated March 12
“Three intake logs from January are missing” — not “sloppy record-keeping”
“What happened to them?”
“The county's March 12 audit found three January intake logs missing. What happened to them?”
A finished script does one more thing: it frees your attention during the interview itself. You cannot listen well while inventing your next question. Folio 8 takes up what listening finds — the follow-up no script can contain.
Practice — new ink and old, interleaved
1.As you sit down, the director says, “This is all on background, obviously.” You—
2.From memory: where does the accountability question sit, and what is the one exception?
It goes last, after the full account — except when you have one chance and no prospect of rapport, in which case the essential question goes first.
How close were you? Grade yourself honestly — it sets your review date.
3.Match each routine document to its cadence.
4.Your question list for the parks story keeps growing in every direction. The fix is—
5.You already hold the unsigned contract from the county's own files. The clerk offers the same fact off the record. What is the craft move?
6.Why does the beat reporter's interview preparation start half finished?
7.Why cultivate a source before you need them? One sentence.
8.Mid-account, the director says the last bed filled “sometime that evening.” The funnel says—
9.Fifteen minutes with a retiring fire chief about a fatal warehouse fire. Best opener?
10.Order these by how well the reader can judge the source's stake, best first.
- On the record, by name and title
- On background, as "a county official"
- Deep background, no source described