When you want to interview someone, the first thing you should do is just call them up or email them and tell them what the topic is, who you are, why you'd like to interview them, and what you want the focus of the interview to be. Now, I don't think you should have to give them the questions in advance. And in fact, reputable news media organizations will not let their reporters give questions in advance, but you could certainly let the person know the subject matter. And try to set up a time where it's mutually advantageous to both of you to meet. Those are some of the basic ground rules. Now, the only reason to try to interview someone is to get information out of them that you think will be of interest to your readers, viewers, listeners, your audience, and also presumably you want to find out to it maybe someone you're interested in their insights, their expertise, their career, it can be a great way to meet people.
Frankly, if you're going to interview someone, a world famous expert in your industry, and they have a brand new book out, they're probably much more likely to meet with you for 15 minutes. If you say, hey, I want to interview you for my anthropology website, my blog, and they have a book on anthropology. And you say, I want to talk about your book and tell my viewers about your, your book and my readers about your book. They're probably going to say yes to that. Or if it's just, hey, I've read your book, and I admire you, can I come hang out and chat with you? It might be too busy for that.
So there are a lot of different reasons to interview someone and different benefits for you, interviewing someone. But let's focus on the fundamentals of there's a particular topic that you want to discuss. There's a particular expert, you want to meet with them. Let's set it up. Let's tell them what the topic is what you'd like to talk about, give them a rough idea of how long you The interview will take and let's set up the interview. So if you haven't done that yet, go ahead and do that or for the purposes of this course, find a family member or a friend or someone you can practice on.
So find someone you're going to interview now.