If a man is interviewed for climbing Mount Everest and the reporter fails to ask how and why he set out to climb the mountain, then that reporter has missed the most important part of the interview, said Capital Public Radio personality Jeffrey Callison during a workshop at The Sacramento Press.

Callison taught The Art and Craft of Interviewing to 41 community members Tuesday. It was a workshop intended for journalists, aspiring journalists and people who are interested in learning how to conduct effective interviews.

“You’ll get the meat of the story from ‘the why’ and ‘the how,’” Callison said. “That’s where the story starts to come out. That’s the most important stuff in an interview – the anecdotes, the personal stories, the emotions.”

Image by: Amy Wong Callison is the host of the daily Capital Public Radio show “Insight” – a live, one-hour program that looks into issues that affect the Sacramento region. He has interviewed thousands of people during his career, and from his experiences, Callison had lessons about how to get information out of people and how to behave in order to gain respect from interviewees.

“How should you treat the people you are interviewing?” he asked. This was a subject that Callison came back to throughout the course of his workshop.

“When you are interviewing someone, it’s not a conversation. It’s about you getting information out of them. Now, having said that, it doesn’t hurt to have a conversational feel to it,” Callison said.

It is important to get a dialogue going but not lose sight of the objective of interviewing someone. It’s not about you, he said, it’s about extracting information.

Image by: Amy Wong “You have to be asking a straightforward and fair question in a respectful way,” he said. “Treating people with respect is treating another person like a human being even if you think they have not treated other people like human beings. That is beside the point. Your job is to find out why they do what they do – how they do what they do.”

As an adept reader of body language, Callison shared his tried-and-true technique for politely communicating to an interviewee that he or she is talking too much. He said that he leans forward slightly and opens his mouth as if to say something. Callison said the person on the receiving end of this gesture usually gets his meaning.

He also explained the difference between being an aggressive reporter and being an assertive reporter in terms of questioning interviewees. Aggressive is imposing your will on someone.

Image by: Colleen Belcher He was critical of CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, whose style of reporting he characterized as “aggressive” and “self-serving.” He said Wallace’s barreling-in style of reporting could put people on the defensive. While Wallace’s methods are effective in his own case, it does not work for all journalists, particularly new journalists.

What happens is you put people on the defensive, Callison said. The point of the interview is to get another individual to share information, and when they feel attacked they will not open up.

Callison defined an assertive interviewer as being respectful and prepared with background research. Cultivating assertiveness will help the interviewer gain the respect of the interviewee.

“Assertiveness is about standing up for yourself and getting what is due to you. That’s the way to approach an interview. If you’re going in as an inexperienced reporter, I think it’s really important to assume a professional persona,” he said. “It’s important to go (to an interview) with self-confidence.”

Image by: Amy Wong The way an interviewer can gain self-confidence is by going to an interview prepared. It helps inform the questions an interviewer might ask. It also helps to figure out what is important to take away from the interview.

Callison emphasized the importance of the first question that is asked during an interview. He used the example of a chiropractor who goes overseas to treat soldiers. If he were to interview such a person, the first question shouldn’t be why did you become a chiropractor? A good question to begin with is what does a chiropractor bring to a war zone?

“Ideally it sets the tone and establishes why this person is here. You have to get right at the heart of a topic,” Callison said.

Image by: Colleen Belcher He suggested that an interviewer “surprise the person.” Do a little bit of homework on the intended subject. Find something about them that they wouldn’t expect the interviewer to bring up. It helps get them out of their groove and fleshes out the person to the audience, he said.

“You want to destabilize the interviewee,” Callison said. “You’ll see them warm up. They’ll soften.”

He also suggested that in the research process, interviewers utilize social media. Callison singled out Twitter as a tool for mining anecdotes from subjects. Twitter is revealing because it can be used as a forum to pontificate.

“I think he gave us such a good, common-sense approach to interviewing. I loved the body language tips,” said recent Berkeley graduate Caity Doyle.

Attendee Sherrie Tyler teaches seminars on mental health and came to see Callison speak because she wanted to learn how to interview people.

“I’m not a journalism major but I just love to write. I’ve never done an interview before, but after this workshop I am confident that I can conduct a professional one,” Tyler said. “It was enlightening.”

The Art and Craft of Interviewing with Jeffrey Callison from Sacramento Press on Vimeo.

Video taken by Andrew Nixon