Interviews

Oh man, I WISH.

One of the things that sucks about being a teaching assistant is that when you grade other students’ papers, you can suddenly empathize with the teaching assistants who will be grading your papers in a few days. This is problematic for me, because it helps if I can completely dehumanize the people who are evaluating my work in order to better hate them when they give me a bad grade.

Every time a student fails to make an adequate logical connection or doesn’t properly back something up with facts, I’m quick to jump in with the red pen and make some snarky comments about how that could have been avoided. But now, as I pull together my final story for Reporting 1 to turn in tonight, all I can imagine is my professor hovering over it with a red pen of her own, seeing all the mistakes that I missed, preparing to make a few snarky comments herself.

My final story for Reporting 1 has been the labor of several weeks, a story about the difficulties faced by public school music programs as a result of budget cuts and the craptacular economy. The story has been difficult because I’ve been trying to interview national sources, and apparently people in Minnesota don’t believe in answering emails.

The band director in question agreed to be interviewed three weeks ago, but after I sent him the questions he apparently decided that, no, he’d rather spend his time ice fishing or masturbating to hockey or whatever they do out there, and instead of telling me that I should look for a new interview source, he just quit responding to my emails and decided to let me figure it out the hard way. Now here I am, seven hours away from my deadline, anxiously waiting on a response while in all likelihood the band director is probably sipping a Harvey Wallbanger on the shore of any one of his fine state’s 10,000 lakes.

In all likelihood, I’m going to have to do without his interview, which probably means I’m going to get some red pen on the part of the paper where I talk about his band because I don’t have a quote from him there. And of course, it makes sense to me that I don’t have that interview there, but when my professor is grading it, all it’s going to look like is me either being lazy and opting not to conduct sufficient interviews, or stupid and forgetting to conduct sufficient interviews. Basically, thanks to the actions of another person I’m going to look like a bad journalist, and as it is I don’t need any help.

If anything, this experience has taught me to empathize with the students whose papers I’m grading – now I realize that maybe there are reasons that some of them don’t have sufficient research to back up their conclusions. Of course, they’re getting most of their information from books, and never in my life have I opened a book and had it say, “I’m not going to give you the facts you need until well after your deadline!”

This is part of the reason I envy history majors – while journalism majors have to report on the here and now, with its uncertainty and its do-nothing Midwestern band directors, history majors report on the past, which is considerably more set in stone. Nobody expects you to actually conduct an interview with Abraham Lincoln (although if you did, you’d totally get an A), so instead you can just use well established source documents that will always be there for you and never let you down. Sure, history is still a time consuming major that requires many long hours spent in the library, but I’d honestly rather blow a few weeks sitting around in the library looking for information I know is there than trying to get it out of some big Minnesotan cocktease.

Journalistic Interview Techniques:

a) Bribe them with candy
-Versatile; everyone likes candy
-Not effective on diabetics (unless in insulin shock)
-Do not withhold candy from a diabetic in insulin shock to get interview; this is unethical, and more importantly, people in insulin shock are bad sources

b) Tell them you’ve kidnapped their family
-No threats necessary; the knowledge alone will do the trick
-Difficult to pull off if subject is with family when you tell him they’ve been kidnapped
-Might put you in tricky legal territory

c) Actually kidnap their family
-No longer have to worry about subject being with family when you tell him they’ve been kidnapped
-Definitely puts you in tricky legal territory

d) Ask nicely
-Works 15% of the time
-People from Minnesota are immune

e) Bribe with sexual favors
-Versatile; everyone likes sexual favors
-Difficult for stories about the clergy unless you work for the middle school newspaper
-Do not recommend for stories about the National Herpes Convention

Truman Capps thinks it was very kind not to slander the band director by name in this update, seeing as that slothful bastard basically cost him several highly valuable points on his final.