Reflections on the Adam Smith interview
Here’s the full interview feature with Adam Smith on Medium, which you can read here.
The interview I conducted with hard news journalist Adam Smith back in January 2020 was written in the style of an interview feature.
As the interview piece is heavily driven by Adam’s quotes throughout the article, this interview feature is focused on his career in the industry, which spans more than two decades in local, regional and national journalism.
Why did I pick the feature interview genre for this piece?
Originally, when I interviewed Adam, I knew immediately that the feature interview genre was well-suited to the piece I wanted to create.
Freelance Writing defines feature writing as:
“Feature writing provides scope, depth, and interpretation of trends, events, topics or people.
While reading different approaches of Sky News Political Editor Beth Rigby being interviewed by Grazia and The Guardian, it gave me some ideas of how to structure the format of my interview with Adam.
What I noticed immediately that Grazia had blockquotes indented in certain sections of the webpage, The Guardian had subheadings which not only made it easier to read through, but more scannable to skim through the piece.
The Guardian’s interview with Rigby also had blockquotes, but the combination of subheadings and blockquotes made it a much nicer read than Grazia’s interview with the same interviewee.
Instantly, I knew that my editorial decision to break up the quotes into specific subheadings was to give the reader more breathing room so that the interview feature was not largely made up of huge quotes of paragraphs.
This meant that readers who read my interview with Adam Smith don’t feel so overwhelmed or intimidated when they read my 1,000+ word interview feature.
Using Freytag’s Pyramid to structure the narrative of my feature interview
I used Freytag’s Pyramid to help me construct a clear narrative structure with my feature interview.
- Exposition: “Umar Hassan sits down with hard news journalist Adam Smith to discuss about his journalism journey, exposing corruption at Sandwell Council and his stint in London for the Metro.”
- Subplot: When Adam was selling insurance for Direct Line and then found a job in the Great Barr Observer for a job with the Lichfield Mercury that he applied for.
- Incident (complication): In the interview where the interviewer questions why Adam would take a massive pay cut to work in journalism from his current job at Direct Line.
- Rising action: After 17 years of working in local and regional journalism, Adam moves to London to work for the Metro newspaper as a news reporter in 2017.
- Climax: Hard work pays off in 2018 as Adam is promoted to Exclusives and Westminster Reporter at the Metro.
- Falling action: While talking about the proudest moments in his career, Adam talks about the investigation into exposing corruption in Sandwell Council and how he was threatened and smeared for doing a story around the Deputy Leader of Sandwell Council.
- Resolution: He’s the only journalist in the area working on the story, which ends up in him winning Journalist of the Year twice and Scoop of the Year for his work on exposing corruption in Sandwell Council.
- Coda: “Doing it for 20 years with a personality, but having this very unique set of circumstances which I managed to always put journalism first in front of almost anything else in my life and thanks to that, I don’t know where my life would have gone if it hadn’t been for journalism.”
The piece is driven by the pacing and temporality of Adam’s career in journalism as it moves from his time working in London for the Metro to exposing corruption in Sandwell Council.
The movement in this interview is largely driven in the sub-sections that focus on phases in Adam’s career in journalism.
From wanting to become a historian to pivoting into journalism, as well as being the only journalist to cover the story around corruption in Sandwell Council, the subheadings drive the pacing of the feature interview.
How does this story link towards my professional field?
The genre of this piece of journalism I did was a feature interview piece, as I interviewed a local hard news journalist in Birmingham, focusing on the person in question, which was Adam Smith.
This links into heavily into my interests of professional practice as a journalist as I enjoy delving into an interviewee’s background and really finding out what makes them tick in their profession.
Editorial decisions made
The decision to start the interview feature off with a background of who the interviewee is was purely down to giving the readers some information of who my subject was (Adam Smith).
Most of my readers outside of journalism would not have a clue of who Adam Smith is so by giving a brief introduction in the first few paragraphs, it would enable the reader to understand why we should bother to read this interview.
The use of mimesis, instead of diegesis is mostly down to the interviewee (Adam) talking about his career in journalism. How he managed to work in London for the Metro, which is in the middle of the piece and his promotion from news reporter to Exclusives and Westminster Reporter.
I do think the interview would have benefited from having another sub-section with Adam’s time at the Birmingham Mail and campaigning for Barack Obama in the 2008 United States presidential election.
That would have added more light and shade to the piece, but with the questions I had constructed at the time of the interview, this has to be considered in future interviews I do. What areas of focus do I decide to interview on and why are they relevant to the subject in question?
The interview ends with a quote that Adam tells me about how he put journalism first and foremost out of everything he has done in his life. It was a much better way of ending the interview, instead of finishing it with something around hobbies and interests, that adds no relevance to the piece.
Alternative formats to my interview feature I could have done
While creating this interview feature, other formats to the interview I have done with Adam could have involved creating a documentary-style film, such as the YouTube film Obama and Me: The Steve Zacharanda Story.
This would reduce the amount of “mimesis” used in the interview feature I created in my Medium post, and bring in some “diegesis”. With a documentary, you could show the interviewee in question and interview him in a studio, but that would make the interview sound formal and predictable.
Another way of presenting this interview feature would be to do it in two parts. The first part focusing on Adam’s early life to university, whereas the second part exclusively focuses on his journalism career and being part of the campaign to get Obama elected in the White House.
The latter alternative format would give me scope and creativity to create a narrative that explores the person in more detail that an interview feature could not replicate. It’s exploring not only the man who is an award-winning journalist, but also who is Adam Smith away from journalism.
