Interviewing Guru John Sawatsky on how to Interview an Author
John Sawatsky\xa0is a Canadian author, journalist and interviewing consultant.
Born in\xa0Winkler, Manitoba, he attended\xa0Simon Fraser University\xa0in the late 1960s graduating in\xa0political science. He started his career as an investigative reporter in the 1970s. While working as Ottawa\xa0correspondent for the\xa0Vancouver Sun\xa0he published a series of articles on\xa0misdeeds of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for which he received the 1976\xa0Michener Award.
He left daily journalism in 1979 to write books, among them a biography of Canadian prime minister\xa0Brian Mulroney\xa0published 1991.\xa0
In 1982, Sawatsky began teaching classes in\xa0investigative journalism and has been an adjunct professor of journalism at\xa0Carleton University's School of Journalism since 1991. Sawatsky also works as a consultant in the practice of interviewing and\xa0has taught interviewing techniques to television anchors, reporters and print journalists in many parts of the world, including Canada, Singapore,\xa0The United States,\xa0Sweden,\xa0Norway, and\xa0Denmark.
He currently teaches an interview-technique seminar for sports reporters at\xa0ESPN. The seminar focuses on remedying "the sloppy and ineffective interviewing techniques often employed by many of today's major television and cable news interviewers".\xa0In 2004, he was hired full-time by ESPN as senior director of talent development.
We met at his home in Connecticut where I tried to discover from him how best to interview an author. During our conversation\xa0we talk about the merits of having an opinion, the positives and negatives of disagreeing with your guests and/or letting them shine, micro and macro interviewing strategies, open and close ended questions, football play-books, Howard Stern, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Johnny Carson.\xa0