How do we ask questions from a sports journalist’s perspective?

In this week’s readings and lecture we went over question techniques for interviewing athletes. As I am sure many of you are, I am also a former athlete myself. I have been interviewed a couple of times, so I understand some of the interview elements from the players perspective. For this blog I will discuss how sports journalists and athletes converse to make entertaining and substantive interviews.

Adapting for postgame interviews

For me, one of the worst things a sports reporter can do is to treat interviews for both teams the same. One team has players filled with joy, while the other is filled with disappointment or anger or both. I have been on both ends of these, and I can say the last thing you want to do after a loss is to answer questions to someone you hardly know. As a sports reporter, you want to be neutral, even in just the way you carry yourself. You do not want to be extremely negative and upset the player even more, but you also do not want to be all smiley and upbeat and make the player roll their eyes. This balance is crucial. With this said, if you interview a player from the winning team you can be a bit upbeat; you may elicit better responses this way. The main key is to “read the room” as they say.

Rhythm of the interview

Athletes want to find and keep a rhythm as they perform, as a sports journalist you want to do the same. You do not want to appear as if you are reading from a script. You want it to feel a bit more like a conversation. To do this, you must develop a rhythm for the interview. Place your questions in a way that makes the conversation flow naturally. This means mixing your question types up. Mix open-ended, close-ended and probing questions.

Example:

One effective way is to start with a moderately open question. This will give the athlete plenty of freedom but still set some restrictions on how they respond. After, you can ask a close-ended question that is related to get a short response. After that you can start to ask probing questions to further expand upon your close-ended question.

Avoid leading, pursue listening

As was discussed this week, we want to avoid the “Patrick Mahomes is the best player ever, don’t you agree?” type of questions. We are not trying to reaffirm our positions or show our knowledge. We want to ask good questions to elicit intriguing responses. The interviewer should be the listener and the interviewee should be the talker. A common phrase you hear in aspects of life is “they started it and I finished it”. In sports interviews you want to think “I start it and the athlete will finish it”.

Questions

First, I want to ask you all have you ever been the interviewer of a postgame interview? If so, do you have any recommendations other than what I mentioned to help sports journalists?

If not, have you ever been on the interviewee portion of an interview? What elements made you more/less apt to answer the questions thoughtfully?