Pre-production Planning - Classic Rock

From looking at various print publications, it is rare to have the questions written in bold exactly as they were asked. In this article from Classic Rock, the questions are blended seamlessly into the article, or simply left out and replaced with a background to the answer.

My favourite article structure is that of Classic Rock's, which uses third person (shown in red) to offer a background of an answer, before switching to first person (shown in blue) for the answer, and occasionally the injection of a question. The juxtaposition of these two offer varied viewpoints, with the third person giving insight into the situation, and the first person giving the artist a voice, bringing the article back to the present. Should the whole article have been in first person, the focus of the article would have been shared between the interviewer and the interviewee. This conflict would have been distracting, and obscured the purpose of the article.

Despite this, I believe a more structured question and answer model would be more effective for my target audience. By keeping the information in chucks this breaks up what could be a daunting body of text.

The fluidity of this extract has inspired me to ask questions in a chronological order, with the questions eventually building to the main chunk of the interview; relating directly to the cover line and contents page text.

At the same time, this extract has shown the importance of long answers from the artist, so open-ended questions which I already have an idea of what the answer will be allow me to structure the article further.