Opening up the big questions

John Sawatsky has made a career of asking the right questions.

John Sawatsky has the kind of reputation that makes my opening an uncharacteristic one.

“Be gentle on me,” I say.

The Canadian’s response is to laugh: “Hey, you be gentle on me.”

Sawatsky has a title, senior director of talent for ESPN, but he don’t use that.

“I consider myself an interview coach. ESPN is a big organisation, obviously, the dominant sports network in the US with about 85% of the sports market here.

“With six or seven networks in the US, the second biggest sports magazine after Sports Illustrated, a radio network, a huge online presence — we have a lot of people doing interviews. A lot of interviewing going on.

“As far as I know, ESPN is the only organisation in the US, if not the world, with an interview coach.”

Sawatsky is known as the man who conducts workshops in interviewing which have reduced seasoned interviewers to jelly as they find their technique reduced, reworked and rebuilt.

“I have seven deadly interviewing sins when I give my workshop, and closed questions are probably the worst. Maybe two thirds of the questions that journalists ask are close-ended.”

If you’re unsure, a close-ended question is one that’s answered with a yes or no; clearly that doesn’t help an interview progress. But that’s not the only pitfall.

“Deadly sin number one is failing to ask a question. One in five questions aren’t questions, they’re statements. That makes a difference.

“Deadly sin number two, then, is the double-barrelled question, asking two questions at once.”

Guilty, by the way.

“Well, before I run through the seven deadly sins in the workshop I always tell those present that if any of them who can claim to be innocent of any one of them, then let me know — because they’d be the first.

“Once you become aware of it, you can improve. You have to become aware of those sins to change your behaviour.”

Sometimes there are other factors. Sawatsky acknowledges that a group scene outside a dressing room, for instance, is not conducive to great insight.

“If you’re competing with other reporters, and I used to be a political reporter in Canada, and I know that situation well, then it’s hard.

“Another reporter competing with you can ruin your questioning line. There are times when I felt like I wanted to punch some of my colleagues because they did a lot of damage.

“There are a lot of points of vulnerability, and that’s one of them — and that’s why it’s better to do interviews one on one.

“If you have more than one interviewer you have more than one goal — the other journalists have their own goals, their own paths they want the interview to go down, and they destroy each other.”

Is sports different to other areas, given you’re asking people to explaining things and they may not be equipped to do so?

“No, sports is fundamentally no different to business reporting, political reporting, fashion reporting. It’s just a different topic. The process is important. If you’re a doctor or a pilot or a lawyer, you go through a certain procedure when you’re doing things. A surgeon going to operate will go through a set procedure. There’s a lot of skill involved, a lot of expertise, but the procedure is pretty conventional, and it doesn’t change if you’re a business reporter or a sports reporter because you’re trying to do the same thing — to get somebody to tell you about what happened so that you can convey that to a larger audience.”

Things have changed, of course, in that sports people now seek to control access. Sawatasky points out, though, that shouldn’t affect the process.

“The interview’s become a very sophisticated battle for control. The other side wants control and to use the interview for their own purposes, whether that’s PR or marketing or getting a message across. If we let them do that then, they’ll use that interview for their own vested interests.

“You can’t really blame them for doing that, but that’s why we have to understand what’s going on. Because our job is to inform our audience or readers about what’s going on in the world of sports. And we’ll be judged on how well we do that.”

He warns, incidentally, that it can be a mistake to hark back to a supposedly golden age of greater access.

“There was more access in the old days, I think that’s correct, but it’s a matter of what you did with it.

“Not that long ago, journalism was a lot less independent than it is now, so what did people do with that access? Cleaning up the people being reported on. Sports journalism has a history of doing that, reporters rooting for the home team and being in the team’s pocket. So you had reporters with great access who’d say, ‘well, I can’t report that because it’ll alienate such and such a person’. Now we’re much more aware of that and take a much more professional attitude, and we say we have a job to do. We don’t choose not to report something because we feel it’ll be uncomfortable for the people we’re reporting on. We take a different view. I think today is a much more golden period than it was back then.”