Find The Hard Interview

Interviews are the heart of what we do as journalists, but some people are harder to find than others. Despite our best intentions this can slant our stories in favor of the businesses and public figures who want to be found at the expense of individuals, who take much more effort.

In an era of smaller budgets and tighter deadlines it’s important to keep reminding ourselves how important it is to find the hard interviews. These are the people who need us the most. 

Athens, Greece – Let’s look at a recent article in the New York Times.

An opening note: Don’t settle for my summary here. Read the article. Read the whole thing. Read it in full. It’s a good article. Read it, read it, read it. 

Okay! In the New York Times, New England Bureau Chief Ellen Barry wrote a fascinating dive into how the chaotic labor market has run smack into summer vacation season. Camps have been scrambling for counselors, Barry writes in her headline. Some have even closed.

Personally, I’ve covered this era of upside down hiring quite a bit. Businesses remain shorthanded at almost all points in the economy, but especially in service, retail, travel, hospitality and other areas most affected by the pandemic. There’s much to be said about this from an economic point of view, but I’ll leave that for my byline elsewhere. (For readers interested, I also recommend the always-excellent Brookings Institute.)

Instead, let’s look at how reporters can handle the story.

In her article, Barry discusses how summer camps across New England have struggled to find enough staff to stay open. Many have closed, some in mid-session, sending campers home because they couldn’t hire enough to make the summer work. Camps such as these generally rely on low-wage seasonal help, largely young people and foreign workers. They’ve proven particularly unreliable in 2021. Most foreign workers still cannot enter the country and, as Barry’s reporting indicates, many young people haven’t taken jobs at summer camps. Others are “failing to show up or leaving jobs without notice.”

This is a crisis for an industry that depends on seasonal help.

Barry’s article is peppered with quotes from camp owners and the parents of children sent home (with an emphasis on the former). Yet in an article running roughly 1,800 words, she dedicates less than 250 to the camp counselors themselves.

This article is about the young people who will not take jobs as camp counselors. Why haven’t they done so? What do they want? What makes 2021 different for them from previous summers?

In her entire piece Barry only quotes two would-be counselors to answer these questions. The rest of the article gives the issue exclusively from the perspective of the business owners who run those summer camps.

I don’t mean to pick on Barry. She is an excellent writer. As a bureau chief at the New York Times, she holds more sway in our industry than I ever will. However I pull this article because it’s a perfect example of how reporters have struggled to cover the spring and summer labor market overall… and an even better example of a lesson we need to remember as journalists:

Find the hard interviews.

Coverage of the 2021 labor market has suffered, by and large, from a consistent tone of voice. Reporters who write about companies that cannot find enough staff tend to take it for granted that this market has broken. That bias in reporting reflects the bias in our sources. If we mainly interview the business owners trying to hire, then absolutely! It will look like the labor market has gone wrong. They can’t hire under wages and conditions they consider fair, which signals a broken labor market.

If we interviewed more workers, we might get a broader perspective. With more sources the headline in Barry’s article could just as easily have been “Counselors say no thanks to a summer of poor conditions, isolation and low pay.” Or it could have been “Midway through the summer of 2021, many camps would rather close than pay the market rate for counselors.”

That’s not the perspective of the people who own these businesses. But it’s probably pretty close to how all of those would-be counselors feel. After all, the fact that this industry exists proves that you can hire summer camp counselors… you just have to offer the right price.

But workers are a tough interview to find. Certainly, they’re one hell of a lot harder than interviewing a business.

That’s true of interviewing any individual. Business owners want to be found. They list their phone number right there on Google, and larger ones even hire entire PR teams just to make it easy for people like us. A business owner wants their voice out there, and I can find them with very little effort.

Not so with individuals. Finding an individual is like looking for a needle in a haystack. How do you find a camp counselor, especially one who didn’t end up taking the job? Do you just dial numbers? Spam emails? Where do you even start? If you’re writing an article on health care, doctors have offices, but how do you find their patients? Technology companies post an e-mail address, but how do you find users?

There are ways to do it of course, but it’s harder and much more time consuming. Interviewing an individual means finding them in the first place. It means finding people who want to talk to reporters (not a sure thing by any stretch). Social media can help, but that comes with its own cycle of confirmation biases and self-selected networks.

So we default to the easier interviews. For a reporter on deadline it especially makes sense.

It makes our work weaker though. Our coverage loses the flavor and narratives that lets journalism tell compelling, human stories. It also self-selects our coverage for very specific voices. Slowly, steadily, we see our work only telling stories from the point of view of people who put their phone numbers on Google and hire P.R. firms.

And if anything, those are the people who need journalists the least. They can take care of themselves.