Schaefer Shares

As a journalism major, I have done my fair share of interviews. Whether it was a student, faculty or friend, some people struggle more than others when “put on the spot.” I have even interviewed our Chancellor, which was an amazing experience and even better interview. My job as a journalist is to make the interviewee as comfortable as possible, but that can be hard sometimes. No matter how reassuring you are, some people can’t get over the initial fright of the camera in front of them, which makes my job that much harder.

I had some of these problems when I was doing my video interviews for our feature story. Like I said, some people are camera shy, especially when they know that a stranger is going to be watching them. I will most likely be changing the names of some of my interviewees. I explained to them that my professor would be the only one seeing it besides myself, but they still did not like that. So, I will have to brainstorm to come up with a few fake names once I begin writing.

For the most part, I did not struggle to find people to interview. I reached out to friends of friends essentially. So, I really don’t know that much about them. I just wanted to find female college students that have had a dating app downloaded at some point in the last few years. It’s most likely because I did not know them that well that they were more uncomfortable sharing intimate details of their lives, which is perfectly understandable. Finding time to interview five people within a week or week and a half time frame was also difficult. But hopefully, my feature story will turn out as well as I hope.