Story Listening — Or, Why You Should Waste Time in Your Interviews

Katie Mitchell was a chatty kid. Flitting first from public school to being taught by her mom, from private school a few years later to an unschooling organization called Project World School, her natural inclination to share her experiences was what kept her ensconced in some semblance of social structure throughout her middle school years. A self-proclaimed bad listener, she saw her talkativeness as a central part of her personality. Only during her last few years of high school did Mitchell, now 20, start to see this as more of a fault than a fun fact.

After taking a college class on story-telling, she became interested in the quieter side of communication. She’s noticed that when she sits down with a friend who’s a good listener, she’ll walk away for days afterwards feeling loved and heard.

Is it a little weird to feel excited for days that someone listened to you? Maybe. But Mitchell says when someone actively listens to you in this social media age, it feels like a gift. “You have all these peeps looking for validation, but we’re not often validators,” Mitchell says.

She used to be one of the ones looking for validation. Now, in her independent study on a concept called ‘Story Listening,’ she’s working on becoming the one to give it.

Time out--what is story listening?

In terms of journalism, Mitchell defines story listening as a way of conversing where you hold space for people to tell you who they are, level the power dynamics between interviewer and interviewee, and practice deep, deep listening. According to Mitchell, the concept behind it is that we love telling stories because we love being heard, and its strength is that it promotes a more honest story being told.

“[In strong story listening], the story-teller feels this trust to be able to open up with deeper details than the surface level story that they might’ve otherwise told,” Mitchell says.

It’s similar to dialogic listening, an “open-ended holding of space that results in co-creating the conversation or story with the person you’re talking,” according to CSU’s Dr. Elizabeth Parks, who studies it. She says the powerful thing about this kind of listening is that there’s an openness to a story emerging that neither person really knew was there. Not only that, but she believes that peoples’ sense of self and identities are actually shaped by the stories they tell themselves and the stories that they tell other people.

“That means that when I invite you to tell your story I am actively shaping your identity, which is a position of unbelievable power and influence,” Parks says.

From a journalist’s perspective, is story listening different from what great interviewers already do?

“Story listening is a rare skill that great interviewers have,” Mitchell says. “My goal is to make it a little more tangible so that it can be taught, versus just this skill that interviewers gain over decades of their job.”

Thanks to 20 years of listening to people, Mitchell’s mentor for her independent study, CSU Professor Mike Humphrey, has noticed that a big part of what people do when they’re interviewed is explain who they are, which makes the critical difference between interviewing and story listening a difference in perspective: a focus not only on what someone is saying, but who is saying it. Instead of going in with the goal of extracting information, he says, story listening tries to get at a more holistic presentation of the human being.

In addition to the difference in perspectives, story listening requires a kind of flipping of the script of how we do interviews, an evening of the power dynamics so that interviewers are vulnerable and open enough to be questioned also. When she was learning interview skills, Parks says she was taught to maintain a more passive role, a role that never imposes an opinion.

“But on the other side, it’s super, super crucial that whatever question you ask them, they have the power to ask you, and you feel obligated in some way to reciprocate,” Parks says.

This can be difficult, as story listening kind of goes against many journalists’ conceptions that they should be in control of the discussion the whole time. But of course, there are some who don’t need any extra power over their stories—politicians, or those who must answer to the public as part of their duty.

“If I have 15 minutes with a politician, I would just flat out grill them, because their position in the world is different,” Humphrey says. “If I did all the techniques I just talked about and they were good at manipulating the message, I am not doing my job for the community.”

When it comes to the common citizen, though, that’s when Humphrey says probably the most controversial aspect of story listening comes into play. Here, he says, the journalist is slightly more protective of the interviewee, in that you want to keep making it clear that they’re talking to the public through you. So when his interviewees share a deep experience with him, he’ll remind them that they’re talking on the record. Some journalists would profoundly disagree with doing this, Humphrey says, but it’s all about evening the power dynamics.

“Yeah, it’s not as opportunistic,” Humphrey says, “but if I do persuade them to be public with it, it’ll be for real reasons, not false reasons.”

Who can story listen?

Because of time constraints and material that may include public servants, maybe a breaking news reporter shouldn’t use story listening very often. The kind of interviewing that breaking news reporters find themselves doing involves more direct questioning at a faster pace, many interviews not lasting beyond five minutes, according to Sady Swanson, a breaking news reporter at the Coloradoan.

She says that in this type of story, asking direct questions is vital to getting the essential information out, like when to evacuate, and what to stay away from. In these scenarios, then, the opportunity for open-ended questions is scarce, because there’s often not a lot of information available yet. Plus, if entities like law enforcement are allowed to lead the conversation, certain things might not be shared.

“There’s always going to be a reason you’re talking to someone, unless you’re doing on the street interviews,” Swanson says. “But even Humans of New York has a strategy.”

Even feature, analysis or column writers may not be able to use story listening every time, but as Humphrey says, you can use modified versions of it in various situations. For a 15-minute interview slot, for instance, your care for your interviewee is shown less in your listening in that moment and more in your thorough, beforehand research on them.

Think of story listening as one of the many tools in a journalist’s toolbox, then—a craft that reporters can develop to help differentiate the kind of stories that come out at the end of the day.

“Story listening is not the only way to have a good interview or conversation, but I think it’s a really useful one,” Parks says. “Especially in spaces that are super charged, where the difference between people feels insurmountable, because I think in that way, stories and narratives, they win the day.”

So, if we want to be more effective interviewers, are there shortcuts? Ways that don’t take 20 years?

As it turns out, there are.

Your first step would be to set up hour long interviews, so that you can talk to your interviewee about themselves as well as the topic. The goal is to understand the shape and scope of their life in a big picture way, to begin to 3-dimensionalize the person who’s in the story instead of 1-dimensionalizing what they have to say.

To reach this hefty goal, you can start by going over a timeline of that person’s life, or with what Humphrey calls “wasting time,” which can be incredibly useful to deep listening. Even just 5-10 minutes of listening to people talk about themselves in way that don’t necessarily apply to the article can give you a sense of the reasons these people are talking to you in the first place.

Once you’ve got a sense of what this person is about, you ask the probing questions—without making them feel probed.

“There’s a rhythm to interviewing,” Humphrey says. “Sometimes you’re trying to go deeper, sometimes you’re letting them relax instead of pounding them with hard questions. I like to mix it up, thinking about the interview as a set of curves and curls, not just a straight line.”

For Mitchell, she finds that she’s done a good job in truly being interested in what people are saying if by the end of their words she has nothing to say. In other words, you should be formulating your response then, instead of jumping on top of their last sentence.

How could journalists who use story listening impact our world?

“One of the perceptions of journalists is that they’re out to get the story first and the people behind them come second,” Humphrey says. If more stories showed some result of active story listening, he says, people would start thinking journalists are there to improve their communities. That, and the stories themselves might be different, even if it’s just the addition of one extra detail, a tiny clause that shows something relational about the experience rather than transactional. Of course, how much we actually use story listening depends on what we think the role of journalism is these days.

“If it’s the classic answer of exposing what needs to be known to the public, then yeah, [story listening] is gonna get cut forever,” Humphrey says. “If the answer was something like ‘to broadly humanize the community so that we know where we live—the good, bad, indifferent and all the complexities that that comes with,’ then I think story listening might show up in the articles more.”

According to Parks, if we went into those conversations with a little more fear and trembling about the fact that we, in the ways we’re listening, are actively shaping somebody’s identity as well as inviting them to shape ours, we would be more kind.

“We would find ways to listen with more integrity and caution,” Parks says, “so that we’re listening ourselves and other people into being in a way that creates a better world.”

As Mitchell says, we all love being heard. So we all have to take turns listening—especially journalists.