They say never work with children or animals, but sometimes it is a necessity to interview minors for news articles and feature pieces – but how do you approach it?
It is true, it can be difficult to talk with children about sensitive subjects, and you might need to broach certain scenarios differently.
Check out this advice from John Woodrow Cox at the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma. He wrote a series for the Washington Post on children and gun violence, which won the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In this article, he shares some of what he has learned about interviewing children, from the importance of being a human first and a journalist second, to doing as much pre-reporting as possible.
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