In 2021, Ethan Crumbley brought a gun to his Michigan high school and shot several classmates, killing four and injuring six others and a teacher. Crumbley, of Oxford Township, pleaded guilty to 24 crimes in 2022. Then, in 2024, jurors in separate trials convicted both of his parents of involuntary manslaughter for failing to secure the gun and respond to concerns about their child’s mental health. The Crumbleys were the first parents in the U.S. convicted for a mass shooting committed by their child. Both now face a minimum of 10 years in prison.
Journalist Elise Hansen grew curious about parental culpability laws, which hold parents accountable for the crimes of their children, after reading a review paper on the topic that cited the Crumbley case as an example. Hansen sat down one of the co-authors, developmental psychologist Colleen Sbeglia, to dig into the reach and effects of these laws for a 2024 Q&A that appeared in Knowable Magazine.
The Q&A format allowed Hansen to cover the nuances of this complex topic, all while remaining informative and conversational. Speaking with a source “who cares a lot about the scientific process but also is very in tune with the human cost of policy turned out to be a really nice mix,” Hansen says. For example, the pair dissected how these laws could backfire, punishing parents in ways that leave their children even more vulnerable.
In a Q&A like Hansen’s, readers get to hear directly from an expert. The writer serves as medium, exploring the expert’s background, thought processes, and accumulated knowledge and streamlining the resulting conversation for their audience. But preparing, steering, and editing an interview as a stand-alone article poses some challenges that differ from those of a typical news story or feature. You need a source who’s both charismatic and a clear communicator to carry the piece and questions that range in breadth and depth to ensure you tell a complete story. With those elements and skillful edits, the end result can be an intimate glimpse into a subject and a character that would be hard to achieve through other means.
Finding the Right Story—and the Right Source
When building out a story idea, ask yourself whether the Q&A format would serve the story you want to tell. The form is a good way to offer a quick take on a current event, such as the spread of bird flu, for example. Or maybe your intended source is an authoritative voice who can add depth and context to breaking news, as Sbeglia did for Hansen. For other, less newsy stories, you might leverage the Q&A’s predictable structure to introduce readers to a large body of work in an accessible way.
Q&As are also an effective tool for profiling a source who’s in the news, such as a researcher who’s recently won an award or landed a leadership role. The conversational nature of these stories allows a peek at the person behind the honor, as in this 2024 Nature Q&A with mathematician Claire Voisin, who won a top prize in the field that year for her pioneering work in algebraic geometry.
Aside from finding the ideal Q&A source, it’s essential to compose a set of questions that will set the tone for an informative yet conversational interview, prompt a source to open up, and deliver the depth of answers you need to reach.
Whatever the case, it’s best if your source is a clear, engaging speaker who doesn’t rely too heavily on jargon. This is key for a Q&A, since it’s essentially composed of long quotes from your source, and you won’t have much space to unpack or frame the things they say. If you haven’t spoken to a potential Q&A source before, see if you can find recordings of any of their talks online or do a pre-interview to get a sense of how they express themselves.
Since the form is inherently single-source storytelling, be certain, too, that your source is worth the airtime. They should have clear standing to speak on your subject with authority, either from knowledge accumulated over years of work or from personal experience grappling with an issue. In a case of journalistic serendipity, Jordana Cepelewicz, math editor at Quanta, managed to find a source with both forms of expertise for her 2024 Q&A with mathematician Danny Calegari. While perusing Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Cepelewicz read an essay by Calegari on the importance of failure in math, a subject few researchers openly discuss. Cepelewicz wondered: “What did [failure] look like for him personally?” Her resulting piece chronicles both the lessons Calegari learned through his own experiences with failure and his insight on how overcoming the pressure to hide failure and disappointment has led to deeper understanding of mathematical problems.
Even if you have a promising source, there are cases where the Q&A format has limitations. A story on a particularly contentious or complex topic, such as defunding the police or using burgeoning technologies like artificial intelligence, may be best told through multiple viewpoints. Interviewing a single source also doesn’t work well when scientists haven’t yet come to a consensus on a subject, says Pablo Correa, a journalism professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and former health and science editor of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. Correa recalls a February 2020 Q&A he penned featuring an epidemiologist analyzing the rise of COVID-19. “I thought at that time that it was a good decision,” Correa says. But later he realized that a rapidly changing issue like the developing pandemic would have been better served by bringing together multiple sources. Elevating a single expert’s voice so early falsely implied that she knew more than other authorities who might have had different perspectives, he says.
Asking the Right Questions
Aside from finding the ideal Q&A source, it’s essential to compose a set of questions that will set the tone for an informative yet conversational interview, prompt a source to open up, and deliver the depth of answers you need to reach. That mark can be tricky to hit, says Rosie Mestel, executive editor at Knowable. Sometimes, writers “go into the weeds” too soon, she says. “Or they may forget to ask some of the questions that would make the interview more enticing and more personal, or richer and more meaty.” Mestel suggests collaborating with editors to find the right breadth of questions for a Q&A.
Let your motivations for writing a Q&A shape some of the questions you ask your source. “Is this a story that you want to create awareness with?” says Halima Athumani, a Uganda-based freelance journalist. “Is this a story that you want to [inspire] action?” When Athumani wrote a series of Q&As with African women in science for SciDev.Net in 2021 and 2022, for example, she aimed to empower girls and young women in Africa. So, she asked her sources questions designed to draw out stories of their career journeys and highlight how their work supports girls from underrepresented communities.
Remember to let the interview itself flow organically. As hard as you might have worked on a question list, don’t be afraid to go off script and pursue interesting tidbits that pop up during the conversation.
You’ll also want to ask questions that inform the introduction of your Q&A. This portion of the piece frames and queues up the conversation, explaining why you took the time to speak with this person—and why your reader should stick around for what follows. While the preamble can draw from background research or from any part of the interview, you can also craft questions specifically aimed at gathering context and other interesting fodder for the introduction. For example, you might feel out possible ledes by asking a question or two about your source’s upbringing or how they found themselves in their field. Or, asking about a timely application of their research could point you to a news hook.
Many of the usual rules for crafting good interview questions apply to effective Q&As. Give your source room to speak: Avoid asking yes-or-no questions or questions that are actually statements. And don’t be afraid to ask basic questions, which can set up more granular points later in the conversation without assuming knowledge on your readers’ part.
Before the interview, get your source up to speed on how a Q&A conversation typically unfolds. Explain that the published story will include a lot of their own voice—a key difference from news stories or features—and send them an example or two of the format. Encourage them to include concrete examples to illustrate their points whenever possible, Mestel says. And give sources a sense of what ground you plan to cover—will the interview center on a single study or news event, or will you also ask about their personal life?
Remember to let the interview itself flow organically. As hard as you might have worked on a question list, don’t be afraid to go off script and pursue interesting tidbits that pop up during the conversation. These tangents will help the Q&A feel lively and authentic. Maintaining flexibility might also alter the direction or scope of a Q&A, as it did for Science News social sciences writer Sujata Gupta in 2025. She was interviewing political scientist Kevin Arceneaux about his research on so-called chaos-seekers—people who prefer mayhem over order and stir up trouble to bolster their social status. Initially, her questions focused on Arceneaux’s newer research on the 2024 U.S. election. But his answers revealed an interesting thread about his previous work on how some chaos-seekers spread misinformation on social media to sow discord. Following this tangent led to a timely and comprehensive story on about why some people “just want to watch the world burn.”
Editing for Length and Clarity
Not every word (or sentence, or paragraph, or even question) from the interview will make it into the final article. A fully transcribed 30-minute interview, for example, can easily run 5,000 words, often packed with tangents, repetition, and filler language, such as “ums” and “uhs.” For Cepelewicz, some interviews can extend to three hours, she says. Condensing these behemoth transcripts into polished articles requires careful editing for length and clarity. In fact, the introduction to most Q&As ends with some variation of the note, “this conversation has been edited for length and clarity,” to signal that the article is not an exact reproduction of the conversation. But what does transforming a transcript into a tight story look like in practice?
Writers and publications vary on the specifics of how to edit a Q&A, but some things hold true across the board. In general, it’s okay to cut parts of a conversation that seem too in the weeds, that are repeated more eloquently elsewhere, or that don’t follow a central thread. You can also rearrange material to consolidate related points so the Q&A doesn’t circle back on itself. The goal is to shape a cohesive story that’s rich and engaging without being repetitive, Mestel says.
Cepelewicz starts by examining the transcript to tease out a core narrative arc for the conversation. Then, she does a few rounds of substantive cuts, trimming tangents and overly technical sections, before whittling down individual responses. Then, “in order to get that arc I was thinking about, I’ll start to move some things around, because often the conversation itself was really meandering,” she says.
If you decide to adjust your questions or combine answers from different parts of the conversation, take care not to take responses out of context or frame them in ways that distort your source’s intended meaning.
Taking a slightly different approach, Gupta lets the core questions she wants to cover in a Q&A guide her editing. She keeps that question list open alongside the full transcript, then moves sections from the transcript into the outline. Sometimes, she color-codes the initial document to keep track of where each section came from in the transcript. When she combines related ideas from different parts of the conversation, Gupta separates parts of the answer using ellipses or paragraph breaks to avoid implying that her source expressed those ideas at the same time.
Even your own questions from the interview are fair game for editing in Q&As. You can rephrase your questions to provide better transitions and improve flow from one idea to the next. You can also edit questions to subsume paraphrased pieces of the conversation that provide important context but weren’t spoken as clearly as other material.
Be mindful, though, of editing too heavily. If you decide to adjust your questions or combine answers from different parts of the conversation, take care not to take responses out of context or frame them in ways that distort your source’s intended meaning. Don’t put words in your source’s mouth, Mestel says. In fact, some outlets, such as Quanta and Knowable, send the Q&A, sans the introduction, to sources before publication to check for any inaccuracies or out-of-context sections.
As you’re editing an interview, you may identify a hole you need to fill, realize you need additional clarity on a point, or find a spot where jargon has seeped into the conversation. In cases like this, it’s better to ask your source to rephrase, or to check a suggested edit with them, rather than trying to revise an answer without their input, Mestel says. With the right edits and transitions, you can stitch different conversations together to produce a Q&A that still feels like a continuous conversation.
Other times, you might need to follow up with a source if new events alter your story’s scope or angle. For example, Hansen’s initial interview with Sbeglia happened after the Crumbleys had been charged, but before they were convicted. Once the convictions came through, Hansen set up a second call with Sbeglia to discuss the no longer–hypothetical outcome and produce a more complete story.
You’ll also need to craft an introduction for the Q&A that seamlessly sets up the interview you’ve edited. This is your chance to color the piece with your own voice and synthesize what you’ve learned for your reader. The preamble needs to spark readers’ curiosity, too, enticing them to read the subsequent interview. Cepelewicz keeps a “graveyard” of intriguing quotes cut from the edited conversation that she sprinkles into the introduction to help give readers a sense of her source’s personality or expertise.
Perhaps the hardest balance to strike, the introduction must deliver enough background information for readers to understand the conversation that follows without giving away its most interesting bits. Ask yourself, “So what?” (Why should your readers care about the conversation?) and bring that information in up high, Athumani suggests. Focus on contextualizing the news hook or providing a primer on your source’s research. And smooth out any places where the reader might stumble by offering jargon-free explanations of concepts that come up in the interview.
When executed well, the Q&A’s introduction does the necessary legwork to let the interview itself shine. That direct access to an expert is “powerful,” Cepelewicz says. “It makes certain topics accessible, or feel really personal, because the person is talking about these things in the context of their own experience as opposed to in a more objective way.”
Skyler Ware is a freelance science writer covering physical and Earth sciences and a TON early-career fellow supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Her work has appeared in Eos, SciShow, Live Science, and other publications, and she was the 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Science News. Skyler has a PhD in chemistry from Caltech. Find her on Bluesky @skylerdware.bsky.social.