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If you only read one Five Easy Questions interview in your whole life, I recommend that you read this Five Easy Questions interview. 

Instead of hearing advice from one high-class journalist, today we will learn the secrets of four high-class journalists.

How high-class, you may ask? Well, our special guest is Robert Boynton, one of my old professors from New York University. He's written for a few different magazines that you might have heard of:  The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and many, many others.

More recently, Boynton published book called The New New Journalism, asking award-winning journalists for professional advice. Today he shares three practical tips from other writers that could change your reporting style forever.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog: 
You spent years interviewing the best journalists in the field for your book. Could you explain the three most practical pieces of advice you received while researching that book (including who gave you that advice)?

For example, Richard Preston finds that using a notebook works better than using a tape recorder because a notebook is less threatening. He uses that misperception to his advantage. When someone says something really explosive, he puts on a bored expression and stops writing entirely.

Preston listens to them in a very noncommital, distracted way, and makes sure not to react to what he is being told. He does this until his short-term memory registers that it is beginning to fill up, and then he changes the subject and asks a question he knows will elicit a long, boring answer.

At THAT point, he begins writing like mad in his notebook to get it all down.