Flipping the script
It is fundamentally weird to be interviewed.
Since I started my first real job as a reporter in the summer of 1995, and even before that when I was public affairs director of my campus radio station, I have interviewed literally hundreds of people.
Some of the interviews were enjoyable, sharing in some triumph, favorite hobby or anecdotes of people long since passed. Others were less enjoyable and in a few cases were downright hostile and had me paying attention to potential exits and what my plan would be if things went sideways.
As a community journalist, you have to be a generalist when it comes to the stories you write. One day a U.S. Senator may be in town making campaign calls, the next day you are talking to an elementary school student about where to get the best chicken nuggets in town. Likewise you could go from sitting in a posh corporate conference room to accidentally stepping into the manure trough while talking to a farmer about the challenges of finding the next generation of agricultural leaders.
None of this truly prepares you for how utterly unnerving it is to be the one being interviewed.
This point hit home for me last week when I was contacted by Mariko Fukuyama about setting up a time to do an interview. If you didn’t guess by the name, she is not from around these parts. She is a broadcast journalist with NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), the largest broadcasting network in Japan. According to their website, NHK serves over 50 million Japanese households.
Their network sent a camera crew, an on-air reporter, and Fukuyama to central Wisconsin to do an in-depth look at Wisconsin as a battleground state in the presidential election. The US presidential election is big news no matter where you are in the world, and the network’s producers wanted to explore what leads people in this area to decide who to vote for and why.
Ultimately this lead to them setting up a corner of our newsroom during production day for an interview with me. Their cameraman was leaning over our light table and the mic operator crouched down in the corner leading to the closet where mops and buckets are kept.
Like virtually everyone who has the privilege of covering a community for as long as I have, it is hard not to have your inherent love of the area come through. I found myself explaining that yard signs only tell part of the story, and that there are good reasons for the voting history of the region founded in the earth, rocks and forests of the landscape. I tried to explain why folks in rural areas inherently are suspicious of the intentions of those in more urban centers.
I was the first of their planned interviews and to that end probably gave them more of an information dump about the people and places here than they really needed.
I am not sure how much, if any, of my interview or of the footage they took of me typing at my keyboard or pretending to read over page layouts will end up in their final piece. It is the nature of interviewing for any story to collect an ocean of information and distill down to a glassful in the final piece. This is even more so for television journalism when the final product may be only a few minutes long and an hour long interview may be lucky to get a glimpse of airtime. They promised to let me know when the piece would be aired and streamed on their website.
Part of me cringes at the possibility of coming off as some sort of bushy-bearded bumpkin.
My personal goal in doing any interview is to present my subject in as positive a light as possible and all I can hope is that the reporters who spent time listening to me ramble about regional politics and the inherent pragmatism and work ethic of northern Wisconsin residents, follow the same sort of ethical guidelines.
If nothing else, the television crew picked a good week to come to Medford with the homecoming celebration going on and Medford steam-rolled the Wausau East team with a lopsided victory.
Nothing screams out small-town America more than high school homecoming football games. I will be interested to see how that excitement and enthusiasm comes through in their final piece.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.
