A Honed Sense for Interviews
By William Sullivan
Doing an interview can be challenging. People who are not used to being in front of a camera or recorded can be nervous, and that makes them less likely to talk. It is also a challenge to be the one doing the interview.
You have to make people who are nervous feel comfortable. You have to make people who are practiced at canned sound bites open up and say something new. You can only get good at interviewing by practice, building up your skills over the course of a career.
Ray Suarez is a practiced interviewer. He has honed the craft over 40 years in journalism. He has interviewed people as famous as Condoleezza Rice, Janet Napolitano and Noam Chomsky. He was the host of Inside Story on Al Jazeera America, and a senior correspondent on PBS NewsHour.
“I have found when an interview is not live and not meant to be broadcast in its entirety, what works best is to get people talking…to establish flow” Suarez said on getting a good interview. “It can create comfort, get a person talking, and lower inhibition once you finally do turn to the meat of the conversation, the real reason you’re talking to this person.”
“People reveal themselves not only in the basic content of an answer, but how they answer…their manner…their responses to questions” he said. “Sometimes you don’t have to really be very aggressive at all. Just persistent….by treating them with care and respect I find people will often come to trust you in short order” he said. They will “proceed with confidence that you are a responsible person.”
He sees serious disadvantages to doing live interviews. “The thing that I like least about live interviews is having to get all the important stuff out on the record under the tyranny of the clock,” Suarez said. “If the person being interviewed knows this (public officials who are often interviewed know well this part of the game) they know they can run out the clock by being evasive, purposely incomplete in responses, or non-responsive.”
He has also had to face an obstacle that an increasing number of Americans confront, a sudden career change.
Suarez suddenly lost his job when Al Jazeera America shut down in 2016. It was the first time in over 40 years that he has not been a practicing journalist. After a short time freelancing, he is now a visiting professor at Amherst College. “Some of the skills involved are very much like being a reporter,” he said. “Mastering large bodies of materials, deciding sequence of exposition so that ideas build on each other in a way that enhances understanding, and knowing when to follow a digression in a way that gives classroom sessions a feeling of spontaneity and surprise.”
His career started out very small. “I worked on my high school newspaper,” he said. “I got my first paid jobs in the business at a local radio station WNEW AM, and the ABC Radio Network.”
What he did there was not the most inspiring work. “I made coffee, changed typewriter ribbons, called in lunch orders for correspondents, loaded paper in the teletype machines, answered phones, and other important journalistic work” Suarez said. But “WNEW was a great place to learn. I took in reporter feeds from the field, cut tape, prepared tape for anchors’ hourly newscasts, and wrote traffic, weather, and sports.”
His career really began, he believes, after he graduated from NYU. “I became the news editor for a trade magazine, and long nights of laying out the student paper proved invaluable,” he said. “I was 22. And launched.”
After two years, he doesn’t see his future in academia. “I do want to return to full time journalism,” he said. “As rewarding as teaching for this academic year has been, events in the US and the World have made this a particularly difficult time to be out of the newsroom.”
Suarez was a cooperative interview subject. Probably as a result of a career spent being on the other side of the table. Except for one question. “I refuse to be cornered,” he said. That question, was what his favorite sandwich is. “I grew up in Brooklyn, with Jewish delis and Italian salumerias close to hand,” he said. “I don’t know how I could be forced to choose between a pastrami sandwich with great deli mustard, and an eggplant parmigiana hero dripping with a fabulous tomato sauce.”