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Comment by jofo25 | Hacker News Reader

The UK still has a good selection of sharp, merciless interviewers. My favourite is Jeremy Paxman, he's quite a polarising personality but cuts through bs like paper.

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I don't understand why interviews (for journalism purposes) are conducted face to face. A written back and forth, such as in a forum or thread, is much more useful at cutting through the BS rather than having to waste time listening to evasive responses. I guess there may be some value in the facial reactions of the subject, but most of the time, if there was a written transcript, I'd have saved a lot of my time and energy.

Interesting point. Although you'd probably get similar evasive responses, the host saying "Now answer more clearly", and a different (but equally evasive) response. They'd have time to concoct a seemingly informative but ultimately useless response.

This happens in a lot of Reddit AMAs...

I absolutely disagree. It is far, far easier to be evasive by text - especially when you have time to compose a reply. Face to face, real time interviews show you when the interviewee doesn't want to answer a question, when they're bluffing, etc.

There might be some people in the world for whom text reveals more of the interviewee's secrets, and other people that pick up more via face to face interviews.

I'm willing to bet that for most people the latter is more intuitive.

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