Remote control: tips for doing better remote interviews

As student journalists begin to venture back to your journalism classroom, I’ve been rethinking how we do, well, pretty much everything in my classroom. Whether you’re returning in-person or virtually, all processes and procedures are up for re-thinking and re-imagining. 

One of the most basic, yet essential will be how students conduct interviews for any type of journalistic content. In my room, I will be instituting a policy of doing all interviews, when possible, via remote means. Needless to say, this is a sea change from how things were done previously when I was insistent they be done in-person as much as possible. 

COVID-19 has changed all that. Safety for my students is the paramount thought in my mind as I plan for the year. To that end, the International Journalist Network has put together a couple helpful articles to this end. 

The first, seen here, lists 12 apps that can be utilized for remote interviewing. I’ve used a couple of them previously. Most interesting to me was the function in Zoom that records separate audio tracks for each participant. I’ve used Anchor and Cleanfeed.net as well and they’re both intuitive and simple to use. 

The second article focuses on some pre-and-post interview things to consider for students to consider when interviewing remotely. A good primer for students as they prepare to conduct their interviews for the school year in a non-traditional manner.