The following has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to/watch the full interview on the Interviewist YouTube channel.

Sarah: How are you involved with interviewing these days?

April: Like so many journalists, I now do a mix of journalism and content writing—so I do a mix of interviews too. I usually do two to three interviews a week. Some of them are sources for journalism projects—I work regularly for a couple of trade publications, so that's straight news. I also really love to write magazine features and more narrative types of things. That's an entirely different type of interviewing. And then I interview subject matter experts for the content projects I work on.

What’s your interviewing superpower? Where do you struggle?

I feel like it's building a rapport and hopefully making people feel comfortable enough to speak freely with me. That's how you get the best quotes. 

I think my curiosity is definitely a plus. One answer will trigger a new question for me, which I usually pursue even if it's a bit of a tangent. Sometimes those tangents can turn into other stories or a really cool insight or detail that you wouldn't have gotten if you had cut off the source. 

I have a hard time reigning in a source who won't stop talking. We're taught by our parents and society not to interrupt. And sometimes in an interview, you really have to just get in there and interrupt. 

Interviewing is something that you're always learning and trying. This month actually marks 25 years for me in journalism, but I still struggle with interviews, and I still get a little nervous before some interviews.

You often write about hard science but weave in narrative. How do you structure interviews to capture both?

I usually start with the science. Usually, I'm interviewing a scientist about one paper, or several papers, or a body of work. I'll ask them to explain the science first, and make sure I really understand what they do, how they do it, and why it's important.

Then I'll transition into questions that are focused on drawing out the narrative. So that's more about what it was like to do the research. Were there any surprises or challenges that had to be overcome, and how did you overcome them? I want to know step by step, how they did a particular study—sometimes there's interesting drama there. I write about environmental science and biodiversity, and there's sometimes difficult field work involved, so I want to hear about that.

 Why cover the hard science first?

Scientists are usually pretty comfortable talking about their science, so it's kind of a warm-up. I find that if I were to start the conversation by asking something about their personal experience doing the research, they might wonder—well, aren't you interested in the science?

How do you get sources to translate extra technical topics so they're understandable but not too dumbed down for an audience? 

That's so important and so tricky sometimes—especially if you get someone who doesn't have much experience with the media and doesn't have much media training. 

At the beginning of the interview, I usually tell them what the publication or the content objective is, and who the audience is. It's usually for a general audience, even if it's for Science magazine or Nature.

So I define the audience, and then I'll say: As I'm asking you questions, please consider the audience and speak about this as you'd explain it to someone you're sitting next to on a plane.

If they can't do that, if they slip into jargon, I'll ask the question again in a couple of different ways. Or, I'll just come out and say: That's a little too technical for our audience. How would you say that to someone who knows nothing about this or about your field? 

What questions do you always ask?

I always ask if there are any surprises along the way, and why is this important? And then I always ask, what's next? A lot of researchers pursue the same line of inquiry for years and years and years.

At the end, I always like to ask: Is there anything else you'd like to add? So many times that has yielded something that just made the story and was super interesting or super important. 

What’s your approach to taking interviews into the writing process?

The first thing I do after the interview is transcribe it. I use Otter.ai or Alice. If I have time, I like to immediately pull out the quotes that I know I'm probably going to use.

I usually already have a document going for the story or the piece of content with my research and the key points. I'll drop in quotes that relate to those key points, so I have them in the right place. That way, when I go to write later, they're already there, and I don't have to go digging back through the transcript. 

Do you have a most memorable interview? 

I interviewed a cancer researcher, and I went through breast cancer. This researcher, her mother also had gone through breast cancer—that was part of her motivation. We ended up having a really interesting, meaningful conversation about the importance of her work. As a journalist, you have to be careful—you're not befriending sources. But sometimes when you're talking about such deeply personal topics—I felt okay divulging that the work she was doing could actually help me, or could have helped me when I went through that. She emailed me later and told me how much that conversation meant to her, and I kept that email.

I also used to be a DJ, and I interviewed Lyle Lovett. That was definitely one of the highlights of my interviewing career. We had a really deep conversation about making music, creativity, the songwriting process, and finding inspiration in the landscape.

Do you have any interviewing muses, role models, or inspirations?

This might sound funny, but if you're familiar with Mel Robbins—she's not a journalist, but she has this really popular podcast, and she interviews scientists a lot. It's a self-help podcast, but she is very relatable, and she really tries to take an evidence-based approach to self-help. I was a little skeptical at first, but she interviews a lot of scientists, and she's very good at getting people to explain complex concepts in a very easy-to-understand way.

Also Katie Couric. On her YouTube channel, she interviews important figures of the day, and I think she's also someone who's very good at asking the right questions in the right way. She's very good at asking tough questions in a way that doesn't put the interviewee on the defensive. And that's a special skill. 

Anything else people should know about science interviewing or your work? 

Science writing can be really rewarding. And I think it's incredibly important in this moment of time. There's a lot happening in the science world, and there's a huge need for well-reported stories about what's happening that people actually want to read. 

🎤 

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