To study news interviewing and writing, we must first understand two key points:
First, the process of news interviewing and writing is one of recognizing, grasping news facts, and conceptualizing, selecting materials, and presenting them according to a certain method. Although this process has strong professional technicality and requires necessary skills and methods, the theory of reporting and writing is essentially about methodology. However, news reporting and writing is not a craft-like activity involving only technical skills. The role of news reporting and writing is to timely recognize and reflect changing objective matters. This recognition and reflection have great initiative and inevitably carry the subjective colors of the reporter, especially given the political nature of news. Whether one can write good news largely depends on the political inclination of the reporter's thoughts.
Second, news interviewing and writing is a practical ability, and this ability cannot be replaced by others. Teachers or journalists can explain theoretical knowledge, introduce methods and experiences, but they cannot directly transmit interviewing and writing skills to students. As the saying goes, "The master leads you through the door, but practice is up to the individual." Therefore, the cultivation of news interviewing and writing skills is like learning to swim in a swimming pool—it mainly relies on personal practice. On one hand, the cultivation of writing skills cannot be separated from correct theoretical guidance. Only by understanding the theoretical knowledge of news reporting and writing can one avoid randomness in practice and quickly grasp and improve these skills.
News and News Reporting Activities
News reports facts, evaluates facts, and serves as an honest record of our social practices and creations. It reflects the pulse of the times. Due to its public transmission of factual information and its role in propaganda, news is widely followed by the public and has become a necessity. Based on this societal need, there are newspapers, radio, and television as news media, which involve activities of news gathering and writing.
Newspapers have always primarily published news (information), and people often look at newspapers first for news to obtain information. Thus, newspapers were once called "newsprint." As the "main character" of newspapers, news occupies significant space, and newspapers primarily function through disseminating news. Generally speaking, a newspaper can exist without poetry, novels, essays, or even commentary and sketches, but without news, it cannot be published and may lose its value. In modern society, with the rapid increase in information needs, the volume of information in newspapers mainly relies on news.
As early as the 1940s, Yan'an Evening News editorial "Make Our Newspapers Better," clearly pointed out: "A newspaper is neither a book nor a magazine; its life is crucially embodied in small and large news reports and correspondence." Newspapers not only cannot lack news but also prominently feature news on their front pages. Chinese newspapers follow an unwritten rule that the first page is usually reserved for important news. Practice shows that whether the front page publishes widely noticed news is a significant indicator of whether a newspaper can capture readers' attention. Since the dissemination of news directly affects the fate of newspapers, in recent years, almost all local newspapers have made "adhering to news" a focal point of their reforms, striving to improve news reporting and increase the quantity of news whenever possible. Many local newspapers have set explicit quotas for the number of news items used daily. According to incomplete statistics, for city-level comprehensive newspapers with four or eight pages, the number of news articles (news) on just the first page (important news page) has generally increased from six or seven to over ten, even fifteen (including briefs). The Shanghai News, which debuted on New Year's Eve in 1999, continuously tracked news around the clock, pioneering the historical precedent of three editions per day (morning, noon, evening).
Modern propaganda tools—radio and television—despite requiring diversified functions such as news, entertainment, and education, still primarily serve as news media where news remains the "main character." According to Xinhua News Agency, a survey by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that urban residents in China tend to watch TV more after 7 p.m., and the highest-rated programs are news programs. Clearly, the main attraction of radio and television stations is news, especially during periods of social change or major events when news programs attract the widest audience.
In recent years, our radio stations have significantly increased the frequency of news broadcasts, with some broadcasting news at the start of each hour. From central to local television stations, the amount of televised news has gradually increased. Major news programs on radio and television stations are typically scheduled during the "prime time" when the audience is most concentrated. News occupies an irreplaceable position in radio and television programming. The evening "News and Newspaper Digest" broadcast by the Central People's Broadcasting Station has consistently maintained a very high listening rate, with audiences spanning both urban and rural areas across the country, and many people have developed the habit of tuning in daily. CCTV's evening "News Broadcast," starting at 7 p.m., has long been the highest-rated "flagship" program nationwide.
The prominence of news in newspapers, radio, and television is determined by the increasingly widespread and profound social impact of news.
The emergence of news as a social phenomenon, from a developmental perspective, can be traced back to ancient times. Once human society formed, interdependent social relationships and world-transforming social practices compelled the need for communication to maintain connections, thus giving rise to news and news dissemination phenomena. As human life became increasingly complex and material and technical conditions gradually improved, news content gradually enriched, and methods of dissemination evolved, expanding the social influence of news. Initially, gestures, sounds, symbols, oral transmission, and handwritten news had limited content, scope, speed, and influence. With the advent of printed and electronic news and modern newspapers, especially modernized radio and television, as people's spiritual and material lives became richer and more colorful, news presented unprecedented content and spread rapidly across society, influencing all aspects of society. In modern society, people's interdependence is higher, and various forms of contact are more frequent and closer, necessitating mutual communication of various types of information. Therefore, news, aimed at transmitting information and propaganda, naturally became an indispensable part of modern people's daily spiritual nourishment, leading to what is known as an "information society" or "news society." As the most convenient and swift medium of information transmission, news serves as a widespread and effective intermediary and bridge for interpersonal exchange. Its timely and large-scale social dissemination can influence the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of the public daily, even hourly.
In socialist conditions, our news transmits new situations, experiences, knowledge, and problems, playing roles in promoting policy propaganda and practical work, exchanging ideas to guide public opinion, praising progress and criticizing backwardness, and combating enemies. It also serves as a channel for consultation and dialogue between leadership bodies and the masses as a form of democracy. Given the extensive and profound social impact of news, our party and national leaders have always placed great importance on news work, affirming the significance of party news work in promoting policies, advancing work, and spreading ideological culture. They emphasize that newspapers and radio and television, as the "mouthpiece" of the party, must adhere to a socialist direction and uphold correct public opinion guidance.
Where does news come from? News comes from facts, is constituted by facts, and records and reproduces facts. Facts are primary, and news secondary—one is the source, the other the flow. First, there are facts, then there is news; their relationship cannot be separated or inverted.
Objectively existing facts determine news, and news reflects objectively existing facts. This is a fundamental principle of Marxist journalism and a specific application of the materialist theory of reflection in journalistic work. On this issue, we have had successful experiences, such as so-called "standing in the field thinking about appearances, running down to find examples, closing the door to write articles," leading to exaggeration, distortion, and even fabrication of facts. Despite this being a problem in certain times and among certain individuals, such results completely invert the relationship between existence and consciousness, facts and news, with poor social influence. This tendency to deviate from and violate reality is still something we must remain vigilant against today.
Correctly recognizing the relationship between facts and news, i.e., the relationship between source and flow, has fundamental guiding significance for news interviewing and writing and is the key to whether the interview-writing process is effective. News comes from facts; without facts, there is no news. What kind of facts create what kind of news, and this cannot be altered by subjective will. For example, the launch of our artificial satellite and the "five consecutive championships" achieved by our women's volleyball team were widely reported. The decisive factors were not the abilities and techniques of the writers but the objective facts of "launching into space" and "five consecutive championships." This illustrates one aspect of the relationship between facts and news. On the other hand, various facts occurring in the objective world, even those with high news value, do not automatically become news. News is based on facts but is not the facts themselves; it is the reporting of facts or the dissemination of factual information. Still using the example of our athletes winning championships in international competitions, if the fact of winning has not been publicly reported, it remains merely a fact known only to those present. Thus, the news of the championship has not yet been formed. Facts are objective realities, free things, while news belongs to the realm of thought, a product of the combination of objectivity and subjectivity.
Various kinds of facts occur in the vast world at all times, but the occurrence and significance of objective facts are not widely understood by the general public. Only when facts are recognized and reflected by reporters and transformed into information disseminated to the public does news appear before numerous readers (listeners, viewers). Therefore, the transformation of objective facts into news involves a process. In terms of journalistic practice, the most fundamental steps in this process are interviewing and writing (or recording and producing). As a means, discovering and capturing news facts and assigning them a specific form of presentation to disseminate to society is the unique function of news interviewing and writing. In this sense, not only is there no news without facts, but without interviewing and writing, news would also be unable to form.
News interviewing and writing are professional technical means used by journalists, correspondents, and writers to understand and reflect reality. The two are closely related, indivisible, and sometimes require overlapping use, i.e., writing during the interviewing process or re-interviewing during the writing process. However, overall and in terms of their respective functions, interviewing and writing have clear distinctions. News interviewing aims to understand and grasp news facts, mainly focusing on understanding situations, clarifying truths, collecting materials, and creating necessary conditions for news dissemination. News writing aims to reflect and express objective reality, primarily analyzing, selecting, and organizing the factual materials obtained from interviews, adopting appropriate genres and presentation methods to transform objectively existing facts into news intended for social dissemination.
News interviewing determines news writing.
As two professional means of recognizing and reflecting reality, news interviewing and news writing are closely linked but distinct, having a mutually constraining and complementary relationship. However, this relationship is not entirely equal. Among them, interviewing is the primary and decisive factor. Just as the relationship between facts and news, interviewing precedes writing, and without interviewing, there can be no writing. Accordingly, we can conclude: news interviewing determines news writing, and the success of news writing depends on the success of interviewing.
News interviewing determines news writing specifically in the following ways:
1. To reflect facts, one must first understand them. Although understanding facts can span the entire process of interviewing and writing, the responsibility of understanding facts is primarily completed during the interviewing stage. How facts are understood during interviews often determines how they are reflected in writing.
2. Catching news is catching facts, and writing news is writing facts. Writing news is subordinate to interviewing facts. It is said that "a clumsy cook cannot make a meal without rice." Similarly, if sufficient factual materials are not gathered during interviews, no matter how skilled the writer, true news cannot be produced.
3. The depth and breadth of interviews directly relate to the depth and breadth of writing. To deeply and comprehensively reflect objective facts through news writing, one must conduct thorough and extensive interviews. Some news works fail to deeply reflect objective facts due to insufficient interviewing beyond the level of the journalist's understanding and reflection.
4. Content determines form, and form follows content. What genre to write in, whether long or short, and how best to express it, all depend on the factual content obtained from interviews, known as "tailoring clothes according to the body." Originally, if the content is suited for news, forcing it into a longer format and turning it into a feature article results in a lack of necessary plots and details, making the "feature article" no longer a feature article. Conversely, fitting content suitable for a feature article into a simple, summarized news item prevents the rich facts from being vividly and concretely reflected.
Sensory things are not necessarily understood, but only through understanding can one better sense and reflect them. The foundation of news writing lies in interviewing, and interviewing determines news writing, conforming to the rules of recognizing and reflecting objective facts and summarizing news interviewing and writing experience. In our news teams, some comrades, especially newcomers to journalism, easily develop a tendency of "valuing writing over interviewing," viewing interviewing as very simple, casually asking a few questions, and unwilling to spend much effort on interviewing, believing that "as long as one has good writing skills, one can write news." What are the results? Due to insufficient "groundwork" (interviewing), unclear facts, and incomplete materials, either "not enough rice, water makes up for it," or even engaging in "fabrication;" or the writing process drags on for a long time, and news cannot be written. The experience in journalism is: "seven parts interviewing, three parts writing," or "six parts running, three parts thinking, one part writing," meaning more time is spent on interviewing than writing. Practice proves that if interviewing succeeds, it can be said that the news is basically secured, and writing becomes a natural conclusion. Therefore, in news organizations, interviewing has always been regarded as the basic skill of journalists, and the level of a journalist is mainly reflected in their interviewing skills. Regarding this point, opinions are almost unanimous regardless of time or place.
In the early stages of our country's development, the prominent Morning Post, on July 19, 1921, published a recruitment notice for part-time reporters, with the following two paragraphs:
"Qualifications for Reporters: Familiar with various social conditions in Beijing, well-connected, able to explain the ins and outs of news. Whether the penmanship is good or not does not matter."
"Duties of Reporters: Spend a fixed amount of time at the original editorial office daily, either narrating or orally explaining the news. Besides this, if the editorial department needs special investigation of social conditions, it also falls under the responsibilities of the reporter (Note: possibly a misprint for 'reporter')."
Here, the part-time reporter obviously refers to a journalist, who is required to be familiar with urban and rural conditions, well-connected, and able to narrate or orally report news, with little regard for whether the "penmanship is good or not." Clearly, as early as half a century ago, our news institutions already placed great emphasis on journalists' interviewing skills.
In the early years of the Republic of China, Huang Jinsheng, a special correspondent for the Shanghai Times stationed in Beijing, was renowned for his "Beijing Correspondence." When discussing the qualifications of a journalist, he believed: "A journalist must have four abilities: one, the mind can think; two, the legs can run around; three, the ears can listen; four, the hands can write." These latter "three abilities" all belong to the domain of interviewing. Huang Jinsheng's correspondence truly reflected his extraordinary activity capabilities in uncovering news. For this, Zou Taofen highly praised him, saying, "Whenever there was a major event, he always managed to use the most agile methods to uncover important news sources and write vivid and humorous correspondence for readers." At the time, famous journalist Shao Piaoping emphasized that interviewing was the most important aspect of newspaper work because the most important raw material for forming a newspaper is news, and news is obtained through interviewing. Some American journalism experts even believed that a journalist could still be an outstanding one despite weak writing skills, but a journalist who is not adept at conducting interviews cannot be considered a good journalist. Regardless of whether this conclusion is fair, emphasizing that one must be good at interviewing to be a good journalist is not excessive.
Edgar Snow was a friend of the Chinese people and a renowned American journalist. His "Red Star Over China" (originally titled "Red Star Shines Over China") became popular worldwide. Summarized in his own words, it was less due to the style and form of the book and more due to its content. So, how did he obtain the rich content for reporting on the Chinese revolution? Two words: interviewing. From June to October 1936, Snow, undeterred by difficulties and obstacles, conducted objective and fair investigations of the revolutionary struggle led by our party in the revolutionary base areas of Northwest China, centered around Yan'an in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. Subsequently, he wrote "Red Star Over China" based on his actual interviews. Our famous journalist Fan Changjiang could write "China's Southwest Corner," which was the result of his in-depth interviews in various ethnic regions of the southwest. The news works of the renowned military journalist Yan Wu similarly stemmed from his "frontline presence" and "rooting in the army" during battles.
In the early 1960s, Xinhua News Agency reporter Guo Chaoren accompanied mountaineering team members and subsequently wrote several influential reports reflecting the life of Chinese mountaineers. He remarked: "We climbed rocky slopes, crossed snowfields, witnessed the mysterious and magnificent natural scenery of Mount Everest, deeply experienced the life of mountaineers at high altitudes... More importantly, we further understood the thoughts, emotions, and spirit of the mountaineers,