Interview focus
The best interviews are about something
A Farm Radio International Learning Module
Interview focus
In this module you will learn
What an interview focus is
Why focus is important
How to write a basic focus statement
How to judge your questions against your focus
Basics of focus
What a focus is
Most conversations wander over a range of topics and interests. That is
the way we speak to one another
An interview for radio does not have the luxury to be able to wander
Listeners do not have and should not need the patience to figure out
what is important in the interview
Your job as an interview is to focus your questions on a single topic, the
relevant topic.
In simplest terms the focus is what the interview is about
Interviews are usually best when they are about one thing.
Take a look at the two images below. Which do you think has a content
focus?
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Interview Focus
Why is focus important?
Listeners want to understand and an interview that wanders makes that
difficult
Listeners identify with human stories. Stories have a beginning, a
middle and an end and are about one thing
Stories have a focus that usually involves a person with whom the
audience can identify
Having a focus helps you, the interviewer, decide what questions not to
ask
The focus statement
Building a focus statement
Interviewers often find it useful to encapsulate their focus into a single
sentence called a focus statement.
It is akin to the topic sentence many people learned about in
schoolthe sentence that tells you what the paragraph is going to be
about.
The next screen shows how to construct a focus statement for an
interview
The easiest form of focus statement
Person
Takes action or is affected
Reason for, or impact of, the action
This is the person being interviewed
What that person did
Why she/he did it.
The easiest form of focus statement
{Subject} took {action} because {reason}
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Interview Focus
Example:
Mary Njomba has planted vetiver grass for the past three seasons along
the contours of her hillside garden because she has found it keeps the
soil in place even during heavy rains
Here is an exercise about focus
Look at the two photos and write a focus statement for each one (The
children are named Jack and Jill).
Focussing questions
Look at the following focus statement and then see if you can
decide which question(s) do not fit the focus
Sunday Okech, a ground nut farmer from Kano, has started maize,
ground nut intercropping because he wants to improve his soil fertility
without spending money on fertilizers
Why did you decide to intercrop?
What has happened to your soil since you started the practice?
How are your goats responding to the new feed source?
How much change have you seen in your maize yields?
Has penning your goats made a difference?
Does their manure help the soil?
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Interview Focus
All the questions are interesting and are all related to the
intercropping system in some way but...
The questions about the goats have nothing to do with the focus of the
story.
If we wanted to include the goats, penning them, feeding them ground
nut crop residue, and using their manure on the field we would have
written a different focus statement
Thank you
You have now completed the module Interview focus.
Remember, you can come back and review this module at any
time.
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Interview Focus
