A Freelancer’s Guide to Interviewing (in 2024) — Part 2: Technology

Alicia de los Reyes
4 min readMar 26, 2024

Here are all the tools I use to set up and interview people for my articles & essays.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

In what I now realize was Part 1 of this two-part series, I shared all my best tips for reaching out and interviewing people for articles. I shared best practices and good questions, and my cold-email text for you to use. I realized that I left out something equally important: the technology I use to do all these things.

Again, when I started out interviewing folks for features in a weekly newspaper ten years ago, the technology was different. Plenty of older people didn’t use email. I recorded my interviews on a tiny recorder that had a USB plug that I could use to download the files onto my computer. I remember in a later interview, the person I was interviewing (a faith healer who I later wrote about for Sojourners and The Billfold) recorded the interview on his phone. It blew my mind. I thought, That file is going to take up so much space on your phone.

These days, everyone emails, and you can record by pushing a button on your screen.

Here are the tools I use to set up and occasionally record interviews (you can read about why I don’t often bother recording in Part 1).

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Alicia de los Reyes
Alicia de los Reyes

Written by Alicia de los Reyes

Freelance writer who loves to make stuff 🧵🧶 Stories about crafts/fiber arts/art/history/women/related | aliciadelosreyes.com