When I was little, my father would tease me for asking outlandish questions.
“In baseball,” I once asked, “if a batter hits a home run so powerful it flies all the way around the planet and crosses the outfield fence a second time, would that count as two home runs?”
As a reporter, I’m still asking questions, learning to connect with people in a way that creates trust and understanding.
My parents both teach history. Lesson plans and classroom anecdotes are so central in our family conversations I often felt immersed in historical questions at the dining room table.
I also grew up with NPR on the radio. In my first weeks at the Independent, I tried to style my interviews like Morning Edition segments: start with a clever comment or joke, then get to the questions, moving smoothly all the way to the “this program is supported by” tag line.
But those NPR interviews have been edited, and all the subjects agreed to answer questions on air. When you’re a small-town newspaper reporter, sometimes people don’t want to talk to you. Sometimes they really don’t want to talk to you. Getting answers to questions means first getting people to trust you.
Even though historians and journalists ask the same five “W” questions — who, what, when, where, and why — dead people definitely can’t answer them. Reporters have to find common ground with the living ones.
The reporter’s approach, I’ve learned, has to be tuned to the subject: interviewing a high school senior and a candidate for state Senate are obviously different (though they can be similarly hard to understand). At the office, I listen to senior reporters interview sources on the phone, learning from their tone and phrasing.
I progressed slowly. During the Olympics, I chatted with an Eversource spokesman about figure skating. I swapped mechanic puns with a candidate who is an auto technician. I talked with a librarian about the wind — if all else fails, there’s always the weather.
I graduated to hour-long off-the-record conversations, invitations to artists’ studios, and walks in the dunes — all of them necessary for gaining important background knowledge or learning the story’s importance in the community.
On the Outer Cape, I found, you could fill a book — or a lot of newspaper articles — with people’s unlikely antics. But real reporting is more than extracting a few good quotes. I still ask those hard-hitting questions, but it’s also important to just let the source talk and perhaps lead me somewhere I didn’t imagine I’d go.
I’ve discovered the role of the community journalist is to learn a town and its people. Asking direct questions, following up, and engaging honestly are the actions of a good reporter, neighbor, and citizen.
And while no one has yet given me a satisfying answer about double home run rules, when I now finish interviews with “Thanks for taking the time — I really appreciate it,” I almost always do.
Thomas Lyons is the Independent’s Mary Heaton Vorse Fellow in Community Reporting.
