Bloggasm

I have long held disdain for the weekly “Questions For,” a Q and A column written by Deborah Solomon in The New York Times Magazine, and I rarely read it. It’s usually a dozen or so questions with a semi-famous person. The answers are often bland and uninteresting. Take this interview with Sarah Silverman, for instance. The comedian seems merely bored and annoyed with her interviewer–the questions are just as uninventive as they are empty.

And, as it turns out, the questions are fabricated. According to the NY Times ombudsman, Solomon has taken interviews that have lasted over an hour and cut and pasted them into segments that make it seem as if they took place in a span of minutes. Not only that, the “journalist” took the answers given by the interviewee and stuck them after questions she had never asked.

Her motive for doing so, she has said, is to edit for clarity. And here lies the problems with Q and A interviews: they don’t transfer well to print.

The worst of these kinds of interviews, in my opinion, are ones conducted with fiction and poetry writers, especially ones that are unknown to me. What could be more tedious than reading a long interview about the fictional plot or style of a book you’ve never read?

Secondly, as a journalist who has conducted hundreds of interviews, I understand that the vast majority of people are not articulate enough to produce mountains of readable speech. Sentences are often interrupted with “um” and other awkward pauses. They go off on tangents mid-sentence (this is when the careful use of ellipsis must be used), and even the most educated can have mildly atrocious grammar because of the speed at which their thoughts are processed when they speak.

Yes, I’ve been guilty of producing Q and A interviews here at bloggasm in the past, but I have since ceased to conduct them. But even when I did– and yes, a lot of those interviews weren’t very interesting–they were usually over email, giving the interviewee the chance to sound at least moderately intelligent.

I think periodicals would do well to leave the Q and A interviews to the broadcast journalists–Terry Gross, Jon Stewart–and focus on producing readable narratives with carefully chosen quotes.