KPBS Midday Edition

Dean Nelson Knows How To Ask Good Questions

By Megan Burke / News Editor, Mark Sauer / Host, The Roundtable

Published April 24, 2019 at 8:29 AM PDT

This story was published more than 5 years ago.

Dean Nelson, author, “Talk To Me: How to Ask better Questions, get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro,” in an undated photo.

Smart, experienced journalists might make it look easy. But a lot of work, thought, energy and personality go into a successful interview.

Dean Nelson knows a lot about conducting interviews.

After a 40-year career in journalism, Nelson went on to found and direct the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University and the annual Writer’s Symposium By the Sea. He writes about his experiences interviewing and in a new book “Talk To Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro.”

"Early on, when I first went into journalism, I was thinking it's all instinct and improvisation and you just kind of wing it and those had mixed results," Nelson said. "I'm more intentional about that now. And when I do interviews with the Writers Symposium I actually look at the questions as a kind of trajectory. I want this to go somewhere and I want this to end somewhere."

Become a KPBS sponsor

Nelson joins Midday Edition Wednesday to talk about the art of the interview.

Nelson will be will be speaking and signing copies of his book at La Playa Books in Point Loma on April 27 at 11 a.m. as part of the third annual San Diego Book Crawl.

Dean Nelson Knows How To Ask Good Questions

Smart, experienced journalists might make it look easy. But a lot of work, thought, energy and personality go into a successful interview. You can hear this story and other local news every morning by subscribing to San Diego News Matters, KPBS’ daily news podcast. Subscribe via iTunes, Google Play or your favorite podcatcher.

Tags

KPBS Midday Edition Books

Megan Burke

twitter

Megan Burke is an Emmy-award winning news editor overseeing the environment, health, and racial justice and social equity reporting beats. Prior to her current role as editor, Megan spent more than a decade as a producer for KPBS Midday Edition, a daily radio news magazine and podcast. Other news production credits include KPBS Evening Edition, KPBS Roundtable, and San Diego’s DNA, a two-part documentary highlighting the region’s oldest traditions and culture using personal artifacts and oral histories of San Diegans.

See stories by Megan Burke

What do you want to hear host Jade Hindmon talk about on Midday?

Mark Sauer

A newspaperman for more than 30 years, Mark Sauer joined KPBS in October 2010 and previously served as the host of the KPBS Roundtable. He spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune after stints at The Houston Post and at two papers in his native Michigan. A features/human-interest writer in the UT's Currents section for many years, Mark also spent about a third of his UT career as an editor and reporter on the Metro Desk. He has covered a wide range of events: Wild fires in Southern California and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; Super Bowls and the World Series; foster care and child-abuse issues; the Roman Catholic Diocese's sexual-abuse scandal and bankruptcy; royal visits of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana; Republican and Democratic national conventions; high-profile criminal trials; and many other stories, from the silly to the sublime. Along the way, he interviewed everyone from presidents to pan-handlers. His work exposing the false accusations and prosecutions of several San Diegans for murder, rape and child abuse garnered Pulitzer Prize nominations and many regional and local journalism awards, including Best in the West, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism and several San Diego and California bar-association awards. Mark has a degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

See stories by Mark Sauer