Formation and psychological aspects of the journalistic interview

Ovrutskiy Aleksander Vladimirovich ORCID: 0000-0001-8589-5891 Doctor of Philosophy Professor; Department of Communication Management and Relationship Management ; Russian State Social University 344023, Russia, Rostov-On-Don, Truda str., 18, sq. 23 alexow1@ya.ru Other publications by this author

Shevchenko Dmitrii Anatol'evich ORCID: 0000-0001-9236-2137 Head of the Department of Communication Management and Relationship Management, Russian State Social University 129226, Russia, Moscow, Wilhelm Peak str., 4 p. 1 info@rgsu.net

In the media landscape, interviews remain the most popular genre, as well as an example of a pronounced influence on mass consciousness – a kind of new "magic bullet". The number of views of interviews of the most successful Russian journalists on the author's Internet channels reaches millionth and billionth values. It should be noted that almost all top interviewers in this circle work in the genre of portrait interviews. Perhaps it was within the methodological framework of journalism that the interview reached the highest point of its development, took shape as an independent genre, and was enriched with new synthetic communication technologies. Professor M. Shadson of Columbia University defines an interview as an "archetypal act of journalism", thereby emphasizing the importance of the genre for the existence and development of journalism in general ^{[1, p. 95]}.

In the 90s of the last century, sociologists D. Silverman and P. Atkinson expressed the idea that modern society, from the point of view of the communicative situation, is a "society of interviews" ^[2]. According to sociologists, interviews are used as a universal means to understand the thoughts and emotions of other people, and, ultimately, are "an integral part of our society and culture" ^{[3, p. 46]}. Note that the global fashion for storytelling in journalistic, marketing, corporate, and psychotherapeutic communications fits into the designated vector sociodynamics. In fact, any story told can be considered as a product of an interview.

In our opinion, the interview is the most psychological genre of journalism, and the formation and development of this genre went in the direction of psychologizing both the technology of its conduct and the targeted content effects. Let's consider the main stages of such development. Interviews, like all classical genres of journalism, have undergone significant transformations. It is generally believed that it was formed as an independent genre in the USA in the second half of the XIX century. Some sources date the appearance of the interview to 1830, linking it with the American publisher and founder of the New York Sun, Benjamin Day, who introduced the concept of "interview" into the professional lexicon instead of "conversation" ^{[4, p. 225]}.

Interestingly, the initial reaction to the new genre from the professional community was cautious, and in some cases negative. So, in an editorial column dated January 28, 1869, the New York newspaper Nation commented on the fashion for interviews with the phrase - "Bluff is a joint product of politicians and newspaper authors" ^{[5, p. 44]}. Adherents of the old journalistic school accused the new genre of "artificiality" and "unjustified obsession" on the part of the journalist ^{[6, p. 242]}.

At the beginning of its triumphant development, the interview was established in criminal journalism – reporters actively used this method of obtaining information to collect interesting information about incidents and other criminal situations. Interviews in this thematic context were enriched with reporter techniques for obtaining and processing information: speed, conciseness, detail, etc. At this stage, journalists behaved like stenographers, i.e. they simply observed people at government and judicial meetings, and then verbatim disseminated this information to the public ^{[7, p. 2284]}. One of the American definitions of a journalistic interview perfectly illustrates the basics of the analyzed genre – "an interview is an event rooted in a time sequence" ^{[8, p. 60]}.

The second stage in the development of the interview was the conquest of the political space. For example, an interview with the new US President Johnson in 1864 was published under the heading "exclusive conversation" ^{[5, p. 45]}. A conversation with representatives of the political elite required a different type of journalist. In particular, as a rule, people who were well acquainted with the speakers were required, who had their own point of view on political and other important public issues and were ready to talk about it and enter into a discussion. The free conversation of a political interview at that time tended rather to an exchange of opinions, and the journalist partly acted as an institutionalized communicator articulating the opinion of public groups ^{[5, p. 45]}.

New speakers and topics of such an interview prompted journalists to act as interpreters of events, and the journalist himself began to have a great potential influence on the political and public agenda ^{[7, p. 2284]}. Interviews have become such a common form of publishing political materials that the reluctance of politicians to agree to an interview could become news in itself ^{[9, p. 28]}. There was also a substantial change in the interview, especially noticeable in Europe. In general, journalists' questions to politicians became less respectful and did not exclude even hostility ^{[6, p. 247]}. The third stage in the development of the interview was its technologization. In the first decades of the 20th century, interviews and conversation were almost synonymous ^{[9, p. 26]}. In 1949, the so-called "standard form" of an interview appeared in the News World Report magazine, based on a traditional question-answer, which replaced the free form of conversation and unified the process of working with journalistic information ^{[5, p. 45]}. News articles no longer wrote about reporters' conversations with politicians, journalists asked standard questions, and the professional standard of journalistic interviews at that time was based on the interrogation format ^{[9, p. 26]}.

At this stage, the journalistic interview actively incorporates interviewing technologies used in related communication practices – psychology, sociology, management. During the 20th century, interviewing and related media citation turned into a set of institutionalized practices and techniques, which, in turn, became the basis of modern news journalism ^{[9, p. 21]}.

The fourth stage in the development of the genre can be described as the transformation of interviews into entertainment. At the moment, in most English–language studies on interviews, its content is revealed as a "confrontation" between a journalist and a news source or encouraging conflict between different news sources, with the main goal being to entertain the audience" ^{[7, p. 2284]}. The conventional framework of a modern journalistic interview has been expanded as much as possible. The highest-rated interviews function in the infotainment format, the process itself unfolds as a free-floating conversation, and the subject of communication cannot be determined unambiguously.

In other words, today the attribution of interviews to informational or analytical genres does not always correspond to practice. Journalistic genres continue to gravitate towards synthesis, and on the genre scale interviews can range from informational (problematic interview) to an artistic form (analogous to psychotherapeutic conversation in the understanding of the latter as a process of personal growth). But even in the case of a problematic interview, the usefulness of information is considered, among other things, through the prism of emotional reactions that can cause certain facts. For example, for a modern journalist in a problematic interview, the subjective side of the problem (emotions, feelings, personal assessments of the hero) is no less important.

The redistribution of information and emotional patterns of journalistic interviews towards the emotional component fully fits into recent social trends – the emergence of the "society of the spectacle" ^[10], the "economy of impressions" ^[11] and the "society of impressions" ^[12]. Summarizing related categories, we can conclude that emotions (feelings) in this new society are becoming a sought-after consumer product (including information consumption), sometimes more in demand than dry facts. Impressions are interpreted here as: 1) a means of emotional and psychological impact on the audience, encouraging individuals through involvement in the process and empathy for what is happening to new consumption; 2) a special type of product that can be sold separately or added to existing ones (in our case, information products) ^{[13, p. 8]}.

The increment of information in the interview process, of course, occurs, but the main task of the journalist is not to do this, but to explicate the very process of such expansion. Obviously, it can be accompanied by emotional effects, tension, and even conflict (interpersonal and intrapersonal), and this process itself is fascinating and causes a greater response (connection) from the viewer than a simple cognitive gain. A subjective assessment of the causes of actions is more important than dry information about the actions themselves.

This also determines the expansion of the role positions of journalists working in this genre: investigative journalist, psychologist journalist, sociologist journalist, provocateur journalist, cognitive scientist journalist, etc. M. Nielsen attributes such unexpected, at first glance, nominations as: "midwife" to the interviewer journalist as typical roles. "buffoon", "skeptic", "microphone holder", "chairman" and "teaser" ^{[14, p. 95]}.

Another feature of the modern journalistic interview is the active use of tools and methods accumulated in other interviewing practices. The expediency of using psychotherapeutic conversation tools by journalists (special techniques for recognizing the emotions of the interlocutor), the experience of investigative interviews (to detect deception) ^{[7, p. 2286]}, witness interrogation techniques ^[15], as well as the use of cognitive interview tools ^[16] are discussed in the specialized literature. Researchers also pay attention to the emergence of various hybrid forms of interviews, for example, when "ordinary people" or artificial intelligence act as an interviewer for politicians or other media personalities ^{[4, p. 225]}.

Thus, in a generalized form, it is possible to designate the stages of the development of a journalistic interview as: 1. Interview-transcript, 2. Interview-quote, 3. Interview-questionnaire and 4. Interview-impression.

A journalistic interview is a communicative and nonlinear process. The communicative situation of a journalistic interview presupposes a high degree of unpredictability of the reactions of the interview subject, and the management of information processes has a complex structure.

In our opinion, the management of information processes in the interview format can be described within the framework of the psychological communicative model of the Johari Window, created by American psychologists Joseph Lift and Harrington Inham in 1955 and is actively used as a heuristic method for psychotherapeutic purposes ^[17]. The model is shown in Fig.1.

Fig. 1. The Johari Window communication model

Within the framework of this model, a journalist works in the interview process with four information spaces. These are: 1. Arena – information known to both the subject of the interview and his audience; 2. "Blind spot" is what is known to the audience, but not known to the subject himself; 3. Hidden – any information related to the subject himself, which he hides from for some reason audience and 4. The unknown – both for the subject of the interview and for the audience.

In general, any interview is aimed at expanding the Arena, which can only be done by reducing the spaces of the Blind Spot, the Hidden and the Unknown.

The arena consists of two sub-blocks: I am real and I am ideal. The real me is what a person really is, with its advantages and disadvantages, victories and problems, strengths and weaknesses. The ideal self is who he wants to appear to be, his idealized image. In some cases, the subject of the interview wants to embellish the situation, to look better than he really is. As a rule, a person begins to present his ideal Self instead of the real one, wanting to please as large an audience as possible, and sometimes this is a manifestation of a self-protective psychological reaction. It is obvious that the answers of the interview subject in the space of the Self-ideal are a problematic situation for the journalist. No one is interested in the idealization of this or that person. Such information does not evoke an emotional response from the audience, and the subject of the interview is perceived as insincere.

Let's note several psychological ways to transfer the interview subject from the I-ideal mode to the I-real mode. The first method involves the use of special diagnostic questions. For example, to determine the position of the interview subject (I am real or I am ideal), the Russian journalist V. Pozner often uses questions of the so-called "lie scale". These questions are part of almost all personality questionnaires and are designed to record the degree of openness of the subject. Examples of lie scale questions are the following: Do you feel hesitation when someone needs help in trouble?; Have you ever felt antipathy?; Can you sometimes talk about absentees?; Are you always willing to admit your mistakes?; Have there been cases when you were jealous of the luck of others?

The affirmative answers of the interview subject to such questions show the journalist (and sometimes the reflective viewer) that the hero does not want to open up and be frank, which means that it is necessary to first switch the presentation mode to the I-real.

Another technique of transferring the interviewee to the position of "I am real" is the "reverse story", when the journalist asks to describe the story in reverse order ^{[16, p. 79]}. Such a non-standard task significantly increases the cognitive load on the interviewee, and fictional (embellished) stories are almost always difficult to reproduce in reverse order.

Alternative questions are also working in this direction. I.V. Vysotskaya defines them as substantive questions with a dividing union or with the meaning of mutual exclusion, i.e. constructed according to a structural scheme: N or N? ^{[18, p. 81]}. For example, money or power? The choice of one of the members of the binary opposition allows the interviewer and the viewer to compare the guest's position with their own and, on this basis, evaluate him according to the principle: "friend or foe" [ibid.]. In addition to this effect, the alternative question shows inconsistencies in the position of the hero well, which, for the most part, is a consequence of his functioning in the space of "I am ideal".

A blind spot is something that everyone sees except the subject himself. Examples of a blind spot may be any external manifestations or information that is not known to the subject of the interview, but is known to the audience. For example, some behavioral habits of a person or personal qualities (from speech perseverations to essential positions). In interviews, the methods of expanding the Arena due to the Blind Spot include questions about other people's opinions about themselves, the reasons for their actions, etc. that do not match the person's position. The same methods include the display of photo and video materials, which are interpreted in different ways by the audience and the interview subject himself in order to clarify the situation. The main vector of reducing the Blind Spot is feedback to the interview subject.

What is hidden includes both information that objectively compromises the subject of the interview, but also (to a much larger extent) information that the subject wants to keep private for their subjective reasons, but does not have significant reputational risks. The problem with such information (Hidden) is, as a rule, that it is known not only to him alone and can be made public by various sources, as well as by the expressed interest of part of the audience in such information. The latter provision determines the appearance of shocking interview formats in which the publication of pseudo-compromising information is staged. Or the situation is interpreted as an excess of the public acquisitions of the interview subject over possible reputational losses. Such communication technologies are often used in show business.

It is obvious that, as a rule, information that arouses strong interest of the audience is hidden, and obtaining such information is often interpreted as a journalistic success. For example, the interview of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci with Henry Kissinger received wide resonance at the time, but Kissinger himself was rated as the "stupidest" act in his life. In the heat of candor, the politician compared himself to "a lone cowboy who alone leads a wagon train on his horse," which caused an ambiguous reaction from his entourage ^[19].

It should be noted that reducing the Hidden zone can have dramatic consequences, complicate or even block interaction, therefore journalistic work with this information space should be based on impeccable compliance with professional ethical standards.

In the Unknown Zone there are qualities unknown neither to the person himself nor to others. The growth of the Arena area due to the reduction of the Unknown, in our opinion, is the most difficult type of interview – an interview that has the personal growth of the interview subject (and/or the audience) as an effect. Cognitive interviews correspond to this type to the greatest extent, and the disclosure of this nomination requires a separate study.

Thus, the interview appears as a non-linear dialogue process with targeted psychological effects of the emotional reactions of its participants, subjective interpretation of events and facts, as well as empathy (involvement) of the audience in the interview process. The formation of the interview as an autonomous journalistic genre is associated with the psychologization of the communication technologies used and its content. In general, information process management in interviews can be described as a systematic expansion of the Arena space.