Last night, I gave a guest lecture to a Georgetown University journalism class. (And yes, I was invited to do so; I can only assume that Michael Lewis was their second choice). During the discussion — which at one point featured me assuming the role of Washington Wizards guard John Wall, because if there’s one mug shot that most belongs next to mine in Spy Magazine’s old “separated at birth” bit, it’s John Wall’s – we touched on the art of interviewing.

The art of interviewing, of course, mostly being the art of preparing for the worst, and settling for the not-quite-as-bad-as-expected.

Thankfully, a decade-plus of trial-and-error experience has taught me a few things about talking to people. As such, here are the eight interviewing tips I shared with the Georgetown class — stuff that’s probably old hat if you’re a seasoned journalist, but may prove useful if you’re young or just starting out:

1. Assume you won’t get the interview

Interview subjects aren’t always accessible. When they are accessible, they sometimes flake. When they don’t flake, they often have nothing interesting or useable to say.

(Note: all of the above happens all the time in sports in politics, where the whole interviewee goal in most on-the-record exchanges is to provide a bland, obligatory soundbite that fills space without being, you know, newsworthy).

As such, a reporter needs a contingency plan. What if your calls aren’t returned? What if they aren’t returned before deadline? Do you have enough information to write your piece anyway? Is there someone else you can call?

If the answer to the last question is yes, then pick up the phone. Actually, you should be doing this anyway. Your backup plan ought to be your reporting plan, period. A good rule of thumb: however many sources you think you need for a particular piece, reach out to triple that number. Interviewing generally is a lot like panning for gold – you have to sift through a lot of mud to find a few decent nuggets of information.

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One of the most pressing challenges facing newspapers today is reaching young readers. You need to address this challenge by presenting a dynamic web site for those participants who prefer that medium and by presenting a more dynamic newspaper that will hold the interest of those reading the print edition. The Readership Institute has provided valuable research that is especially helpful in understanding how readers in general and young readers in particular experience the newspaper. A Readership Institute study in cooperation with the Star Tribune in Minneapolis showed that the approach you take in writing and editing your newspaper makes a difference in how young adults react to the paper.

Important reader experiences. The Readership Institute identified these experiences as most important for growing readership among young adults:

• Gives me something to talk about
• Looks out for my interests
• Surprise and humor

Write and edit your stories with these experiences in mind. As you talk about story ideas, ask yourself questions that will guide you to deliver each of these experiences where appropriate.

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He stands at the lip of the bowl, which looks like a giant, empty swimming pool, and gazes at the brand-new concrete. He plops down his skateboard and sets his left foot on top of it, rolling it back and forth a few times near the edge. Except for his blue jeans, he’s wearing all black—shoes, T-shirt, cap—and looks like any other skinny ten-year-old, except for the hospital band on his right wrist.

The skate park isn’t officially open yet, but his mom has a friend with the city who gave them special permission to get in this Sunday morning. Today he has one goal: to drop in, skate over to the other side, and return, building speed so he can zoom up the side of the bowl, power his board over the edge, slam the front wheels on the concrete, turn, pivot on the back wheels, and cruise back down. It’s a trick called a rock and roll, and he’s never done it in a bowl. Other kids will have all summer to learn how to do it. Johnny Romano, the youngest professional skater in the world, has 45 minutes. This is his last chance.

Johnny Romano first climbed onto a skateboard when he was two years old. It was 2000, and Johnny and his four-year-old brother, Joey, found their dad’s old board in the garage. Joey lay on it as if he were a surfer paddling out to catch a wave. Johnny stood on it as if he were a skater—and didn’t fall off. Their father smiled. Mike Romano had grown up in Houston, skating every day on the half-pipe in his yard; he spent summers in Galveston, where he surfed the waves and rolled down the seawall. Mike had been serious enough about skating that he’d gone to California once and competed in a contest with Tony Hawk, who would one day become the most famous skateboarder of all time. But he had left the sport far behind when he met Julie Batten while both were working at the Southwest Airlines ticket counter at Hobby Airport. They married in 1993 and settled down, first in Phoenix, then Dallas, and eventually Houston.

Mike built his little skaters a huge half-pipe in their north Houston backyard—24 feet long, 16 feet wide, and 4 feet tall. He would pad up the boys’ knees and put helmets on their heads. Johnny was like all kids at first, legs straight, body stiff, nervous. But he skated for hours, rolling back and forth, up and down the wooden slopes, and learned to bend his knees, lean his shoulders forward, and use his arms for balance. He wasn’t a daredevil; he was cautious and methodical, afraid of getting hurt. Mike had to nail a hockey stick onto the ramp a foot off the bottom so Johnny would have a makeshift ledge to drop in from. Then Mike moved it up six inches and Johnny dropped in from there. Eventually he worked his way to the top.

The Romanos—including daughter Sophie, who was born in 2002—took regular trips to Galveston, where they had family and friends, and Mike would take his boys out on the waves. Johnny loved the water (he wore his swimsuit all the time) and stood on his first surfboard at three. He was a remarkably good-looking child. “Joey is handsome,” his mother would say, “but Johnny is pretty—Ashton Kutcher pretty.” Johnny was a natural athlete and free spirit, always moving. His dad and brother would be inside playing a Tony Hawk video game and Johnny would be out on the half-pipe skating. He’d ask them, “Why play a skateboard video game when we can just go outside and skate?”

So it was obvious to Mike and Julie in early May 2005 that something was wrong. The seven-year-old boy who usually leaped out of bed in the morning now slept in. He was lethargic and pale and complained that his gums hurt. Three trips to the dentist solved nothing. On May 26 Johnny was riding his board in the driveway when he had to stop; he told his parents he was dizzy. “I felt wobbly at school today,” he added. They took him to a doctor, who drew blood and told them to go immediately to Texas Children’s Hospital. Johnny had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, the most common form of childhood cancer. If untreated, he would probably die in weeks.

It’s only ten a.m. but it’s already hot, that sticky Galveston hot. Johnny’s not alone at the park. His best friend, Heath, a seventeen-year-old local skating legend, is there too, and so are Joey, Sophie, their grandmother and aunt, and other friends and family. Of course Mike and Julie are there. Mike brings his board. He has close-cropped hair, a holdover from two years ago when he shaved his head in solidarity with Johnny. The two share the same toothy grin. Julie is pretty and tall, with dark hair. She is methodical and driven; although she has never skated a day in her life, she understands her son better than anyone.

Johnny’s cancer had struck him in his marrow, where the blood cells are made. His immature white blood cells were multiplying rapidly; if they weren’t stopped, these “blasts” would crowd out the developing white and red cells and platelets and spill over into the bloodstream, spreading to his other organs. In the early hours of that first morning, Mike and Julie waited at Texas Children’s Hospital in a terrified daze, not knowing what to do. Finally a doctor gave them a piece of good news: Johnny was in the standard risk category, with a 70 percent chance of surviving. Julie broke down in tears. “Seventy percent?” she cried. “That’s barely passing!”

Johnny’s doctors laid out a battle plan: seven months of harsh weekly chemo, then three years of monthly “maintenance” treatment. His first chemo drug, vincristine, was so powerful that a stray drop on the skin or in the muscle would eat it away like acid. The treatment would kill good cells as well as bad ones, making Johnny susceptible to dangerous infections. His platelets and red blood cells would be replaced by transfusions, but the infection-fighting white blood cells would have to grow back naturally, from the very bone marrow that was being destroyed by the chemo.

Texas Children’s Hospital, one of the largest pediatric hospitals in the country, takes up several skyscrapers near downtown Houston; it’s a self-sustaining entity, with every kind of pediatric oncologist a kid might need, as well as heart and kidney specialists for the complications that often arise from cancer. From the start, Johnny impressed the doctors and nurses with his cheerful calm, his refusal to complain or cry, even when he got chemo injections. Johnny’s first shot of vincristine had to go into a vein in his hand, and the nurse kept sliding the needle in and missing. She tried again and again and finally gave up in tears, leaving another nurse to finish the job. On the eighth try, the second nurse got the needle in. Julie was frantic. Johnny didn’t cry at all.

After an intense seven days in the hospital, he went home but had to return for weekly clinic visits, which sometimes took all day. The hospital became Johnny’s second home, and his life began to revolve around a regimen of chemo injections, blood tests, transfusions, bone marrow biopsies, and spinal taps, which he especially hated. Sometimes tears would well up in his eyes in anticipation of them, but even then he wouldn’t ask, “Why me?” He’d hide his head in Julie’s lap for a minute, compose himself, and pop back up. Soon he was smiling again, especially when he talked about skating. During lulls in treatment he would put one foot on the base of his IV pole and skate the hospital hallway. Lying in his bed waiting for a transfusion, he would perch two fingers on his four-inch Tech Deck skateboards, turning his lap into a miniature skate park.

Mike was a regional human resources director at Starbucks and Julie was a stay-at-home mom, so she wound up spending most of the time with Johnny at the hospital. She held his hand during spinal taps, read e-mails from friends, stared at his face while he slept, memorizing the curves of his cheeks. She asked about every dose and test result and took notes on what the doctors said. In June 2005 she started a blog. She wrote almost every day, chronicling, cheerleading—“His nutriphils (white blood cells) jumped from 580 to 940! WOO HOO!”—and proudly bragging. “He never cries, screams, or complains,” she declared. “NEVER.” He was still a little boy, though, and she divulged her maternal pleasure when he would need a “3-2-1 blastoff!” count to take his pills. She wrote about her two other children as well: Joey was angry about his brother’s illness but envious of all the attention he was getting; Sophie was too young to understand anything but how much she needed her mommy. Julie’s optimism was occasionally betrayed by her fear. “Tomorrow is a scary proposition,” she wrote about the future. Still, the bottom line was simple: Johnny was going to beat this, one step at a time.

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I need editors. Editors allow me to be more daring, to attempt to write what I have not written before in ways that may not work. If my assigned editors are not adequate, I develop colleague/editors who can help me keep learning to write.

I recognize the time pressures on newspaper editors. I am not describing long psychiatric sessions but professional conversations designed to improve a specifc piece of writing and the overall performance of individual writers. I realize I am describing the kind of editing you may only be able to do once a day or less, but in the long run this will save time because it places primary responsibility for clear, lively, significant writing where it belongs — on the writer. It may break the cycle of dependency — “If they are going to write my stories I’ll let ‘em” It may also create writer/editor relationships in which each person can speak in a shorthand when on deadline. They may have a context to which they can refer as they need.

• Assignment. Most writers will produce better work if they are asked how they think a story should be covered. Writers may propose what the editor could have said, but if writers suggest the approach themselves, the writer will be more committed to it than if they are executing a command. The writer may need a few minutes to think and then respond, perhaps in writing. When writers are listened to, they may surprise themselves by what they say. I also need editors who give me a specific length and a firm deadline–and hold to it.

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“We wuz robbed,” wails the boxer in defeat.

“We were robbed,” corrects the editor in search of the inoffensive.

The words we live by are not always the words we see in print.

A football star who talks like a high school drop-out on the 11 o’clock news may speak with the precise grammar of Alistair Cooke in the morning sports section.

A gritty city councilman who sprinkles conversation with an occasional “ain’t” may be a statesman declaring “aren’t” from the front page.

How far can a writer stray from the words? And just how sacred are the sentences between quotation marks?

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POMPANO BEACH, Fla. — Every night at bedtime, former Celtic Ray Williams locks the doors of his home: a broken-down 1992 Buick, rusting on a back street where he ran out of everything.

The 10-year NBA veteran formerly known as “Sugar Ray’’ leans back in the driver’s seat, drapes his legs over the center console, and rests his head on a pillow of tattered towels. He tunes his boom box to gospel music, closes his eyes, and wonders.

Williams, a generation removed from staying in first-class hotels with Larry Bird and Co. in their drive to the 1985 NBA Finals, mostly wonders how much more he can bear. He is not new to poverty, illness, homelessness. Or quiet desperation.

In recent weeks, he has lived on bread and water.

“They say God won’t give you more than you can handle,’’ Williams said in his roadside sedan. “But this is wearing me out.’’

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Gene Roberts’ first editor was blind but it didn’t deter him from teaching the young reporter out of the University of North Carolina one of the most valuable lessons of his long, storied career.

“Make me see,” the editor of the Goldsboro (N.C.) News-Argus would demand after he’d heard Roberts’ daily farm column read to him. It’s a lesson Roberts never forgot as he went on to cover the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War for the New York Times and, as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, lead his newspaper to 17 Pulitzer Prizes in his 18 years there.

The journalism icon, now 76, who teaches writing and the history of the press in the civil rights movement at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism, spoke at CUNY last Thursday to students in Prof. Michael Arena’s investigative journalism class and, yes, a few awestruck professors.

Here are Roberts’ Rules of reporting and writing, some suggested reading and one plan for how to get a job:

•    Make Me See. Whether it’s a sweet potato that looks like Gen. Charles DeGaulle or the scene of a brutal civil rights confrontation, write visually so your readers feel like they’re there..
•    Make your writing conversational. His News-Argus managing editor had Roberts read both the print and radio versions of the AP Wire.  The radio wire was far easier to read, which taught Roberts another valuable lesson.
•    Make sure you understand what your story is about. Write a simple description of why your story matters.  We call it the nut graf.
•    Get the height of the smokestack. Roberts told a story about legendary editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who sent a reporter back to the streets when he couldn’t tell him the height of a factory smokestack.  The moral of the story:  Details matter. Specific details matter even more.
•    Read good writing and ask why it works, and apply those lessons. Roberts recommends the annual “America’s Best Newspaper Writing,” an annual compilation by Poynter of the reporting and writing winners of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) awards; he also suggested “Writing for Story,” by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Franklin, who annotates his book with his writing strategies.
•    Learn your craft. Learn  how to report and write. Don’t get hung up on whether you’ve mastered the latest technology of delivering news; it’ll probably change by the time you graduate.
•    Do it all. Luckily, that’s part of the curriculum here.  In his early years, Roberts covered everything at small dailies — cops, courts, government, politics, breaking news.  He also bounced from being a reporter to an editor and back, which made him even better.  Here at CUNY, you work online, broadcast and print.
•    Work for a small daily or broadcast outlet where you have to learn to do it all (See above).
•    How to get a job, according to Roberts.  Go to a small newspaper, show up at 8 a.m. and stick around all day to talk to the editors who can hire you.  That’ll show the initiative and aggressiveness editors want to see (and it’ll save time-starved editors from having to respond to a letter or email).

Read More of Heath Meriwether’s blogs at: http://blogs.journalism.cuny.edu/writestuff/about/

TIJUANA, Mexico — The aficionados hissed, at both the matadors and at the bulls. They cursed everyone conspiring to rob them of that beautiful, horrific moment in a corrida, when time slows and life and death become blurred.

I sat in the tenth row of Tijuana’s Plaza Monumental, in the shade, surrounded by friends. We took long pulls off a bota, getting drunk on Mexican wine. It was opening day of the 2006 season. My buddy Santiago, an amateur bullfighter, leaned over and nodded solemnly. Just wait, he told me. Either the great Spanish matador El Juli or one of his two Mexican counterparts on the cartel would amaze us yet.

“When you see it,” he said, “you will know. You will know.”

Some books on writing advise that “the passive voice should be avoided.” Bad advice. Both voices have their uses.

Clauses can have one of two “voices.” In the active voice, the subject acts. In the passive voice, the subject is acted upon.

Active: “Rover bit the man.”
Passive: “The man was bitten by Rover.”

In the active sentence above, the subject (Rover, the dog) acts, biting the man. In the passive version, the subject (the man) receives the action, is bitten.

Active sentences have more power, first, because they’re shorter and therefore punchier; second, because they emphasize the actor acting; and third, because the reader knows who did what. You choose the active or passive voice depending on what you want to emphasize. Take these two examples:

Active: An unidentified motorist hit a crippled nine-year-old girl yesterday.
Passive: A crippled nine-year-old girl was hit by an unidentified motorist yesterday.

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