ABSTRACT
Eany each semester Leon Dash gave his journalism students at the University of Illinois a taste of the interviewing techniques he had honed over more than thirty years as a Washington Post reporter. Listening well is also essential to reporter’s success as a journalist. Robert Stevenson, an associate professor of journalism at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina, tells students that listening well is the first step toward improving their reporting and writing. More often, each person is thinking about what he will say next, if he’s paying attention to the conversation at all. Emotions and feelings may be communicated by nonverbal means. Being a good listener means paying attention with all of reporter’s senses, not just reporters sense of hearing. Dash’s method of interviewing is designed to help students in his immersion journalism class examine contemporary social phenomena through the lives of individuals and families.
