To record or not
When I wrote an article in 1998 for CFO magazine about Herman Miller, Inc., I interviewed CFO Brian Walker and his top people. At the time, I didn’t record my interviews. I figured it was too much of a hassle to deal with the tape machine. Too much work to listen to the tapes. Too much of a risk that the recording would dampen my subjects’ candor. Better to work from a distillation of my notes.
But that was a mistake. Little did I know that, ten years later, I would write a book about Herman Miller, Inc.—and I would thirst for the full text and texture of those decade-old conversations. Yes, I still had my notes, buried in boxes in my basement. But I couldn’t pull from them the detail I wanted—and certainly not the quotes—and now I wanted every twist and turn of the conversation.
I mention this because it demonstrates just one reason why I’m now a big advocate of recording all interviews: You never know what you’ll need later. Even a day or two after an interview, you often realize that what you emphasized in your notes is not what you want to emphasize in your writing. With a recording, you can go back and retrieve the lost threads
This seems obvious, but a debate rages among journalists about whether to bother with a recorder. Are recordings a help or a hindrance?
To be sure, recorders can hinder a relaxed, free-flowing, honest conversation. In fact they can ruin an interview, especially about sensitive topics, because sources can clam up or deflect tough questions. Recordings also require you to take time—often time you scarcely have—to transcribe. Pulling the most valuable nuggets from a long transcription is also hard. So there is a case to be made that recorder-free interviews are a better option, above all for quick-turnaround articles.
But with digital recorders today, the advantages of recording vastly outweigh the disadvantages. For a book, unlike an article, the interviews you rely on are often months old. A recording—just the sound of someone’s voice—restores the language and music and “body” language of the conversation. Recordings put you right back in the moment.
Other advantages of recorders are legion: You can listen to your source better during the interview, because you’re not simultaneously using your mental bandwidth to condense the conversation for your notes. And you’re a much better conversationalist and probably ask better follow-up questions.
If you do record, how do you make the best of it? A few steps I follow: Put the recorder as close as possible to your source. Explain the ground rules of how you will use the recording—to put sources at ease, I tell them I won’t share the audio with anyone. Do use a notebook to a least jot down the time (minutes/seconds) when juicy stuff comes up. With these time stamps in your notes, you can later zoom right to the good parts on your computer—without all the back and forth of an old tape machine.
The most useful aspect of digital recordings is that, just before you write a part of your manuscript, you can listen to key snippets of conversation. The recorder restores your total grasp of the material.
I did three more interviews with Brian Walker for my book, Merchants of Virtue, in 2009 and 2010. I don’t plan to write another book that would include his comments. But who knows? I now have the audio of those interviews and 120 more stored in my computer. With the cost of storage dropping close to zero, what’s there to lose? Writing the manuscript for Merchants of Virtue was easier because of the recordings, and in some unpredictable way my writing in the future probably will be, too.
