Critical Reflection

Undertaking the process of Assignment 2 (radio current affairs in-field interview) I met some challenges and also some pleasant surprises.

At first when I received my round (social services) I was immediately a little disappointed because I felt that some other rounds I would have much preferred to do or would have found them a little more interesting to look into covering a story on, but once I got into it and looked around a bit I found that the topic had a fair few potentials to really get some good information on that was newsworthy but also interesting for me to follow up on which I feel is very important to achieving a more successful outcome.

I got in contact with a worker at a disability care centre in Yass and was able to find out a few interesting things. One of which being what I chose to focus my interview on with that of them having problems with staff to client ratios, this bit of information appealed to me the most because when dealing with disability clients the main concern is always how they are being treated and also is it to the best standards possible or fair compared to other education institutions so once I learned out about that piece of information it was clear and easy for me to choose which direction I wanted to take with my interview.

Getting the interview done wasn’t a big of a hassle as I initially thought it was going to be, I hired the gear and it was very straight forward to setup and use and as such I really didn’t have any technical problems as i was very careful prior to make sure i tested the audio quality.

Going into the interview I took a piece out of one of our lectures on how best to conduct an interview style and it was a quote from Andrew Denton which states,

“No, I don’t use notes. And there’s a very specific reason for that. Very early in my career I realised that notes can become – not a prop – but a trap. I also believed that not having notes tells you guest first of all that you’ve done your homework and secondly if you don’t have notes they have no idea of knowing how much you may or may not know about them.”

This quote appealed to me and I decided to follow it and go into the interview with no notes whatsoever but rather doing a lot of research prior to going in such as on the Valmar website and just a general read around of articles on the matter. Furthermore I wanted the interview to flow and I personally feel that if you have set notes as Denton states you can get caught into the rigid routine of just reading question by question and you can miss out on important spontaneous follow ups on answers or information that is interesting or necessarily you were not expecting.

Towards the end of the interview I had a moment where with my interviewee we talked about some other non-relevant areas and had a bit of a laugh which was fine but it ended up causing me to forget a little about the interview at hand and I slipped into a relaxed state to the point where when I got to sum up the interview I did it poorly because we had already got to the stage by talking about other non-relevant facts and things. In future I need to be more conscious and really train my voice and mind to come back into the task at hand more and sum up better much like in my literature review where Dennis Wilkins states journalists sometimes tend to do rather than think was exactly the mode I got myself in and as such I summed up my interview very poorly I feel.

Overall it was a good learning curve for this assignment and I feel as though I certainly learnt some things to improve on for my follow up assignment while also gaining extra confidence that will no doubt help out as well.