Interviews play a big role in journalism. Not only do they make the work better, they make it more entertaining for the readers to hear different sides of a story.

Shortly after I didn’t meet deadline, I was trying to interview a student. However, the teacher wouldn’t let me because their class work needed to be done. I tried to go at the beginning or at the end of class, but the teacher insisted that I do it another time or not at all.

There have been countless times when I wasn’t able to get interviews until the last minute. As I know interviews will make an enormous impact to my work, I try my hardest to get teachers and students at Ada High to cooperate as much as possible. Throughout the week I gather information on the topic about which I’m writing. Usually I have to gather quotes, pictures, interviews, links to related articles, etc., and sometimes it takes even more than that. In my case, there was not a related story, or one close to what I was writing.

Sometimes my adviser can talk to other teachers and have better luck getting permission for me to interview a student during class.  However, sometimes even she gets a hard no.

Sometimes the teacher is not the only one standing in the way of a potential interview.  The students, themselves, can also impede the process.

This year, the seniors have been my hardest to interview group.  Seniors are a “big deal”, so I was going to write about their favorite high school memories. In addition to gathering the quotes, I also had to take a picture of all of them. Some were very cooperative. On the other hand, a few were not. They either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come up with a good high school memory, they wouldn’t take a picture because they thought they looked bad, or they didn’t want to take a picture with certain people. With lack of seniors agreeing to work with me, and one another, it became a struggle. I felt like the quality of my article would be much better if they would have given me more to work with than simple quotes. Although I struggled with the interviews and collecting data, I finished what I started.