The possibilities offered by the Internet are great when it concerns social relations. Journalists are given the advantage of being able to get in contact with a lot of people throughout the world and gather first-hand information from the original sources - that is, by making virtual interviews with people wherever they are in the world, and at a very cheap price. Several of the tools which have been dealt with in the previous sections - email, IRC, or MOOs and MUDs - allow you to make virtual interviews. What you will find here is an assessment of the pros and cons of each tool that enables us to make journalistic interviews.

A basic distinction

For practical reasons, we will assume a basic distinction about the possible tools for virtual interviews. We will distinguish between real-time communication tools, such as IRC and the forms of inter-personal communication allowed by MOOs and MUDs on one side; and delayed communication tools, that is email, on the other. Real-time communication tools allow interactivity, the exchange of an immediate two-way flow of information. Delayed ones do not. This has certain implications for their performance.

Pros and cons of real-time communication tools

IRC and MOOs and MUDs allow people to meet and interact. IRC is aimed at providing chat, enabling its users to literally talk to each other, in the sense that questions and answers actually follow each other. MOOs and MUDs are virtual environments where people can interact, based on telnet. You visit a MOO, meet interesting people and have a conversation with those people. In both cases, remember to always choose private communication with your interviewee, instead of the public kind which is also possible.

What are the pros of these means of communication for us as journalists? A considerable, interesting point is the environment they are based on. You can choose from an enormous number of IRC channels, which allow you to easily find people related to specific topics - any kind of topics. The same applies to MOOs: among the educational or research-oriented MOOs, you are quite likely to find who you are looking for. Without moving from your desk. Second and most important, both IRC and MOOs and MUDs allow real-time communication, unlike email. In real-time interviews, your interviewee can answer your questions immediately, and you can interact. That makes a difference.

The shortcomings of real-time communication tools are related to their interactivity. What we are used to, as real-time talk, is immediate question and answer. That is possible only partially on IRC, for instance. There still is a considerable delay between the subsequent messages, which sometimes makes the communication quite strange: you might ask a question and get an answer which was intended for the previous question. You have to type your message and submit it quickly, so it is not 100 % interactivity. However, the development is very fast and we are getting closer and closer to "true" real-time.

Interviewing via email

The alternative to the previous methods of virtual interviewing is email. With email, you formulate your questions, mail them to your interviewee, and patiently wait for an answer. Let's directly deal with pros and cons.

The pros, first of all. Remember what we said about real-time comunication on the Net: it's still in progress, and the meaning of "real-time" should be taken with some caution - there are still delays and lots of possibilities for misunderstanding. An email user does not expect any interactivity. He/she will formulate the questions as clearly as possibile, and very straightforwardly, to reduce the chances of misunderstanding. Moreover, the interviewee has all the time to answer the questions, can reflect about it, and thoroughly explain details. Email is great for research interviews, dealing with complicated or controversial matters. And remember, you can protect your sources and yourself by encrypting the messages with PGP.

Email also has a few shortcomings. Among them is of course the time delay between the mail containing your interview, and the mail from your interviewee. Moreover, nothing guarantees that your mail will be answered promptly, and in some cases it might be unsure whether it will be answered at all. A lot of people receive such large amounts of email every day that they have to choose which ones to open and read.

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