Why email ‘interviews’ are not interviews at all

Insightful piece by Cory Doctorow, in which he gets right to the heart of the matter. “There’s a much better reason that email interviews don’t work. The ten essay questions are set in stone. No matter how I answer question one, question two will be the same. I’ve conducted a fair number of interviews for magazines and newspapers, and while preparing a list of questions is a good idea, it’s a poor interview indeed that consists solely of the questions you start with. An interview is a conversation — ten questions is a questionnaire.

I appreciate that email interviews are easier on the interviewer — for starters, you don’t have to transcribe a phone or in-person conversation. But email interviews are much harder on the subject, who doesn’t get to collaborate with the interviewer on his answers, and has to struggle to sound interesting all on his own (not to mention, the interviewer doesn’t have to do any transcribing, but the subject has to do a lot of typing). ”