{"id":5933,"date":"2024-07-16T22:37:26","date_gmt":"2024-07-16T22:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/?p=5933"},"modified":"2024-07-25T19:42:35","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T19:42:35","slug":"listen-stranger-danger-cherubs-learn-how-to-approach-people-for-interviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/07\/listen-stranger-danger-cherubs-learn-how-to-approach-people-for-interviews\/","title":{"rendered":"LISTEN: Cherubs learn how to approach sources"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Stranger danger? Cherubs learn how to approach people for interviews by Medill Cherubs\" width=\"800\" height=\"400\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?visual=true&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1873415955&#038;show_artwork=true&#038;maxheight=1000&#038;maxwidth=800\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">ELAINE JIANG (on tape): Hi, I\u2019m a summer journalism student at Northwestern University and I was wondering if I could interview you for my story.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Good interviews are foundational to good journalism. But they don\u2019t always come easy\u2026 or at all. Listen to a few cherubs reflect on their experiences interviewing people around Evanston.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">CLAIRE CHEN: I\u2019ve never had to go up to a person on the street and ask them for an interview, so I was really, really scared.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That\u2019s cherub Claire Chen of Edina, Minnesota. Claire initially faced a lot of rejection with in-person interviews, only getting one yes after asking six people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">CLAIRE: I felt like I was doing something wrong when I was approaching people, so I was trying to figure out what everyone else was doing, but I think it was just maybe the people I asked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eventually, Claire changed locations to the Lakefill path and tried again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">CLAIRE: I realized that like during my first few interviews or like trying to interview people, I made up excuses for why not to approach people, like I was like, \u2018oh they\u2019re wearing their AirPods, oh they\u2019re walking their dog, oh they\u2019re holding bags,\u2019 like I shouldn\u2019t approach them. But like on the second day I was like I didn\u2019t care anymore, because a lot of people were like &#8216;Yeah, I approached people with like AirPods and headphones in and they\u2019re actually more welcoming than people without them,&#8217; so that\u2019s what I started doing and I got like a lot more interviews.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cherub Faith Jung from La Mirada, California was also nervous for her first few interviews, but she says that most people in Evanston are nice and open to interviewing. They just have to be asked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">FAITH JUNG: I think the biggest thing is just to go for it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">As the weeks progressed, cherubs got to talk to all kinds of people. Cherub Ben Fogler of Needham, Massachusetts interviewed someone during the Fourth of July parade, who unexpectedly gave him a lot of quotes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">BEN FOGLER: I think I took away that like you really can talk to everyone. Like, the moral of the story I guess is it\u2019s okay to go up to people you probably would not normally talk to and you can honestly get some\u2014like he was one of the best interviews I\u2019ve had here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">After four weeks, cherubs have learned a lot about the art of interviewing and how to get people on the street to agree to going on the record.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">CLAIRE: Approach them with the phrase &#8216;can you help me?&#8217; I did that a lot and most of the time I got a yes, because if you include the word &#8216;help&#8217; in your phrase, people like feel obligated to like do something for you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">FAITH: Be confident, don\u2019t be shy, be bubbly and happy because more people\u2014people will tend to be nicer if you\u2019re happy and nice as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">From Evanston, Illinois, I\u2019m Elaine Jiang of Belmont, California.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> Listen to how a few cherubs conquered their fears and learned to approach strangers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":6059,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,23,339],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[280],"class_list":["post-5933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-audio","category-front-page-academics"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":280,"user_id":129,"is_guest":0,"slug":"elainejiang","display_name":"Elaine Jiang","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/3a8c43c63faded23fd7e982f244f02a594f30b72de59bd7321f8168a7dded3d3?s=96&d=mm&r=g","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5933"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6628,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5933\/revisions\/6628"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5933"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=5933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}