Students ask, CN+R answers: Journalism, interviewing and more

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SILER CITY — News + Record Publisher Bill Horner III, Reporter Hannah McClellan and Photographer Kim Hawks spoke with about two dozen CCS students about journalism at a presentation to Chatham School of Science and Engineering students last Thursday.

The students, part of the school’s American History elective course, are working on a journalism-related project — either completing a history photo blog or writing an opinion piece about the meaning of freedom. Their teacher, Anna Blackwell, invited the News + Record to speak with students about interview and photography tips, among other subjects.

During the presentation, students asked many questions about reporting and interviewing, specifically in Chatham County. That Q&A session is recorded below, and has been edited for clarity and length.

What happens when a story goes viral?

McCLELLAN: Getting attention for the work you do, and knowing that it resonates with people is something that is rewarding, because it’s affirming that maybe you’re writing and telling stories that people want to hear. Even so, those stories don't always go viral, while others do. I do think showing that you can write things that people care about matters. One of my favorite things about it is the potential for it to have a positive impact in the community. When people in the community care about that story, and maybe have strong feelings about it, a lot of times it does give institutions and people in power the push to prioritize that issue.

HORNER: When we think about doing stories, we want to make sure that our stories are covering important topics and that they’re compelling and well written. But you never know what’s going to go “viral.” You want to have an impact with the work that you do, but you can’t always control what takes off.

What story has gotten the most positive reception?

McCLELLAN: I personally am a huge people pleaser, so even to this day, if someone isn’t super thrilled with something that I wrote that they were quoted in, it honestly still stings a little bit. But the goal shouldn’t necessarily be when you write a story to get a ton of public or positive reception, the goal should be to capture whatever story you’re covering as fairly and accurately as possible.

What do you like about photography?

HAWKS: What I love about newspaper photography, I love the community. I love being in the community as a way of recording history. There’s also decisive moments like if you’re covering a basketball game or volleyball game, like covering the excitement of the winner, and the emotion of the losers. I love the variety of assignments that I get. I cover high school sports, special events like the Chatham County 250 Founders Day, St. Mark’s has a weekly free meal and the health department’s been doing all these COVID clinics. So there’s just no end to what we can cover in the town. It’s very exciting — and you get to meet so many people.

Do you censor? How do you keep subjectivity out of the paper?

HORNER: Our responsibility to the community is to report what’s relevant and what’s going on. We can’t cover every single thing, but we won’t not cover something just because we think it’s unpopular.

Now to your question about subjectivity: I think the way we describe that in our business is we don’t editorialize stories. In other words, we don’t inject our opinions into stories. For a newspaper credibility is everything. If someone thinks that we’re slanting the news or trying to inject a certain viewpoint or opinion, that’s not good. And I don’t think it happens.

McCLELLAN: It’s definitely our goal as journalists to be objective, but I think it’s also important to make a distinction between, we naturally as people are not objective — we all come into whatever job we have with our own perspective, experiences, our various identities that affect how we see the world, what first comes to our mind when we think about who to reach out to for a story, things like that. That’s just natural, and exists as a neutral thing. That’s just what makes different people different. I think the goal as journalists is to, use those things to our advantage, and, in spite of those things, be so aggressive in our reporting and our reporting processes that we write and produce objective stories.

Do you have freedom when it comes to your writing and reporting?

HORNER: I really kind of leave it up to them in what they want to write about. Part of helping reporters flourish in their creative abilities is to let them pursue what they’re interested in. The worst thing is to have a reporter who is just not interested in certain stories that they’re assigned, and they just go through the motions. I’m fortunate that everyone on our team will embrace the stories I ask them write. Part of the reason they do is because I don’t ask that much of them outside their own interests, and fortunately, their interests align with what I think would be good for the paper — so that works out.

Vanessa Martinez-Camposeco, one of the students at the Chatham School of Science and Engineering presentation last Thursday, asked what to do when an interview isn’t going well. CN+R staff answered questions for about an hour. / Staff Photographer Kim Hawks

What do you do when an interview is going poorly?

McCLELLAN: I will say no matter how many tricks you have up your sleeve, it’s still not fun when you’re in that situation. The best starting point is going into any interview over prepared. For me, that means even if I only have five minutes to prepare for an interview, I’m gonna either write down on my phone Notes app, or in my journal, bullet points of what I want to ask.

I also find it helpful if an interview is going really poorly to try to make it less of a formal interview for a second, and more like we’re two people having a conversation — rather than, I am a scary journalist asking you scary questions and you’re responding to me. And then sometimes — and I think this is rarely the case — sometimes a person is just not a good person to interview. At that point, if you’ve tried a bunch of different strategies to get them to open up and answer more in depth, and it’s not working, then you want to be polite and finish the interview and then go back to the drawing board.

HORNER: You want to try to set people at ease. And one of the best ways is to remember that most people like talking about themselves. Another thing is that you don’t want to ask “yes” or “no” questions. You want to ask open-ended questions. And another thing is to not be afraid of silence. Ask a question and if they don’t say a lot, just let it hang. And just don’t say anything. Sometimes people just need to process the question before giving a response.

Do you have to be an extrovert to be a journalist?

McCLELLAN: I hope not, because I am not an extroverted or outgoing person. That’s part of the reason I over prepare. Some of it’s muscle memory, so some of it has gotten easier, but some days, I have to pick myself up, look at my notes and say like, 'I know how I’m gonna have this conversation, I can do it.' So it does get easier with practice, just because you kind of find little tricks that help you.

HORNER: I’m an extreme introvert. I’m totally comfortable talking to a large group of people, but I’m very uncomfortable talking to just one person. But what makes it easiest, like Hannah said, is that it’s muscle memory. I’ve done it so much that I know after that first 30 seconds, it’s going to be fine.

Is it better to be informal or formal in an interview?

HORNER: You want to do whatever makes the person you’re interviewing comfortable. So you don’t want to be really formal.

McCLELLAN: The actual conversation itself, I tend to try and make it informal in the sense that it’s like, I’m a person, not someone just reading a list of questions — I’m trying to have a conversation with someone rather than just talking at them.

The only other thing I would add is that regardless of how formal or informal a conversation or interview feels with someone, it’s really important to make sure the person you’re talking with understands why you’re interviewing them and understands the interview process. You want to make sure they know that you are a journalist reporting on a story and your informal conversation is something you’re either writing down or recording and could be quoted.

What is your favorite story that you’ve ever written?

McCLELLAN: ​​The first would either be a few months ago, during Ramadan, I talked with community members and religious leaders at a mosque in Raleigh about what celebrating Ramadan was like for the second time during the pandemic. And that was just a really, really touching story, where people shared a lot of really personal things with me about their faith. So that was just a really rewarding story to write. 

The other, from last year, is a story about the work that Black churches in Chatham are doing for justice efforts, and how they are talking about justice in their communities. I probably talked with, like 10 different churches, along with pastors and community members that didn't all end up being in the story. But that was just a story that again, felt really meaningful to report and write. I felt very grateful to all the people who talked to me for that story and I was very grateful to be a journalist and have the opportunity to work on a story like that.

HORNER: I'll share two as well. One is about a friend of mine who is a writer, a runner, and he's a cancer survivor. After recovering from cancer and being declared kind of cancer free as cancer came back, and so I got a chance to talk to him about that second cancer diagnosis, and about the struggles he went through as he tried to recover from that. 

Another story was when I was introduced to a Chatham resident who was a diplomat who worked for the U.S. government in about 60 different countries doing reconciliation work. But he moved to Chatham and got involved in the NAACP, and was working on the fact that Chatham County had the second highest number of lynchings in all of North Carolina and he was working on a project to memorialize the lynching victims and champion.

Did you ever feel your work was inferior? How did you go about fixing it?

HORNER: Not every story is going to win an award. I think, as a writer, you just push through it. Do your best.

McCLELLAN: It’s really important to regularly check in with yourself and think, what are my goals with my stories, and have I met those goals? And also just to reflect on mistakes, or even if it wasn’t a mistake, something that could have gone better and thinking about how you can address those in the future.

The other thing I would say is I think unfortunately sometimes it’s human nature, and especially in journalism, which can be very competitive, to perceive your own work as being inferior, when you’re really doing good work that you should be proud of. And that's something you should fight against.