Career conversations, not archived profiles

An interview is a labour agreement dressed as a conversation. Someone is giving time, reputation and, often, unpublished process. The old Music Insight magazine ran many of those conversations. This rebuild will not lift them from the Wayback Machine, tidy the adjectives, and pretend we were in the room.

Heritage /interviews/ article URLs redirect to this hub. Named profiles from the archive stay in the archive.

Before you hit record

• Say whether you are recording, and on what device.
• Say where the piece will appear and whether the subject may check quotes.
• Agree whether off-the-record exists, and what that phrase means to both of you.
• Read the public primary sources first so you do not waste the hour asking APRA AMCOS’s homepage back to them.

If you are a student, say so. People are often generous when the frame is honest.

Ask about the job

Useful questions sound like procedures:

• Who is on the split sheet, and who is missing?
• What does load-in actually look like in this room?
• Which file do you refuse to accept from a remote session?
• How do you invoice a school?
• What did you change after a hearing test?

Useless questions demand a ranking, a feud, or a prophecy. They also tempt the writer to invent a colourful answer when the tape is quiet. We will not do that on this site, and we will not host it as a guest post.

Afterward

Check the spelling of every legal name, band name and organisation. If a figure appears — a date, a duration, a number of players — it must have come from the subject or a document. If you want to mention ARIA or APRA AMCOS, link the page you used.

Do not “clean up” a quote into a slogan the person did not say. If the sentence only works as a pull-quote because you added a clause, cut the pull-quote.

First-person instead of extraction

If you want to write about work you yourself do — teaching AMEB repertoire, mixing in a spare room, stage-managing a regional week — that is a contribution, not an interview you perform on someone else. Keep it citeable. Keep other people out of it unless they agreed.

What a career conversation is for

The point of an interview on this rebuilt site is not heat. It is transfer: a reader should be able to do a job slightly better after the piece. That is why we ask about split sheets, load-in, invoices and hearing tests rather than about feuds.

If the subject cannot talk about a procedure without naming a third person who did not agree to be in the piece, stop and either get that permission or write around them. “A previous engineer” is enough. A dumped legal name is not clever.

Student newsrooms should file their questions in advance when the subject asks. Professionals should still answer a few live questions — that is how you learn what you did not know to ask — but the live questions should still be about work.

Notes, tape and storage

Keep the tape for the term you agreed. Do not keep a secret second recording. Do not put an off-the-record story in a group chat. If your course requires you to lodge an interview for assessment, say that before you hit record.

When you write up, put the method under the piece: recorded on this date, checked spellings on that date, no chart figures used. That sentence is how education writing becomes citeable.

If you want a first-person piece instead of extracting someone else’s hour, contribute it. If you want a long explainer, pitch a guest post.

Questions we will not host

• “Who is the biggest artist in Australia right now?”
• “Give us an exclusive feud.”
• “Predict the chart.”
• “Repeat what you said in 2016,” followed by a paste from the Wayback Machine.

Those questions produce either invented numbers or extracted speech. This desk is for procedure. If a subject wants to talk about a specific workplace reform, point at the public document (Fair Work, a society consultation, a peak-body submission) and quote that document, not a vibe.

The restored /interviews/ index is therefore a classroom and a filter, not a personality mill.

If you arrived from an old profile URL, you were not personally refused. The rebuild rule is blanket: no extracted archive speech.

Aftercare

Send the subject the spellings you used if you promised a check. Do not send a rewritten personality. If they ask to delete a workplace allegation they made about a third party who cannot respond, take it seriously. This desk would rather lose a spicy paragraph than host a pile-on.

Then file the tape as agreed and stop performing the interview in group chats. Career conversations are workplaces too.