A Freelancer’s Guide to Interviewing (in 2024) — Part 2: Technology
Here are all the tools I use to set up and interview people for my articles & essays.
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).
