Interesting that you should post this, since it was passed around our office by email yesterday.

I agree that interviewing technique is a neglected topic both in and out of J schools, but I disagree with most of Henderson's article.

Barring a mechanical failure, I'd always trust a recording more than my notes (I usually bring a both a digital recorder and a Livescribe pen just in case one doesn't work), and (more importantly) when I listen back to recordings I almost always find interesting nuances, or even facts, that may not have seemed significant during the interview. (That's one drawback of the Livescribe pen--it gets rid of the drudgery of listening to entire interviews, but you're more liable to miss that hidden good stuff because you go right to points you took care to take notes on or that you remember particularly well.)

Henderson's advice to frame interviews in terms of "the story you want to tell" sounds more like how one would conduct an interview for video than for print, because soundbites have a completely different function than information gathered for a print piece. She's certainly correct that writers/interviewers should have a list of questions they want/hope to ask, but I think they should also be open to embracing the shape the reporting/interview/draft might take on its own, and avoid interviewing or writing "to theme." In other words, I don't see why eliciting only the material you want is any better than Henderson's worry about only getting material they want to give you.

Along these lines, Henderson's stated preference for email interviews (aren't they more like questionnaires?) is completely perplexing. Email is great for eliciting or confirming purely factual stuff, but I think they are otherwise an absolute last resort. How could they possibly be better than a phone or in-person interview when they turn over all control to the interviewee--something Henderson says elsewhere you should avoid at all costs? Moreover, the text you generally obtain from an email exchange reads nothing like spoken language. You don't just lose spontaneity, as she concedes, but it is highly unlikely that you'll get quotable material that serves the purpose of quotes in a print piece, which is almost never to explain stuff. As one of my science writing teachers used to say, "Never use quotes to explain," and I think that's good advice for print work.