The first big name I ever got the chance to interview was Nobuo Uematsu. The resulting article, Final Fantasy Composer’s Chocobo Cosplay Wishes, Avatar Scoring Dreams, is probably the reason I got the opportunity to intern at Kotaku. Make no mistake: landing interviews with celebrities can hugely boost your journalism career.

However, the very attributes that make celebrity interviews appealing to editors are the same things that make them hard to pull off. You have to avoid getting starstruck in front of somebody you might find intimidating. You can’t get an interesting article by gushing either; you have to ask the tough questions like you would with anyone else.

As the former press liaison for Anime USA, I’ve supervised a lot of press conferences with big names in anime, games, and fandom. Based on my experiences both as an interviewer and a supervisor, here are some tips to make your first celebrity interview run smoothly:

• Let the convention get you in touch. If the celebrity is attending a convention as a special guest, that means you’ll need to work with a press liaison or Guest Relations volunteer to organize your interview. Celebrity guests have busy schedules at conventions—autograph signings, panels, and more. If you try to write directly to Vic Mignogna’s agent about his Otakon schedule, he’ll be just as clueless about it as you are! Usually writing to press@[insertcon].com will get you in touch with the right person to arrange the interview.

• If you can Google it, don’t ask it. I always cringe when I hear somebody ask an anime voice actor, “What was your first voice acting role?” This is a simple piece of knowledge that anyone could figure out with a quick Google search, or by scanning the celebrity’s IMDB page. Make sure to research your subject beforehand and only ask questions you can’t find out any other way. A good rule of thumb is to ask the celebrity about her opinions, favorites, and other subjective material instead of readily available facts.

• Come prepared. It’s important to prep for any interview in advance, but perhaps even more important with a celebrity interview. If you’ve prepared questions ahead of time, you’re less likely to stumble and get nervous in front of somebody you really admire. Remember that 10 questions usually equals about one hour’s worth of talking time. It also helps to invest in a tape recorder to avoid misquoting somebody whose public image is especially important to their ability to get jobs.

• Be ready to go off script. While it’s important to prepare questions in advance, you don’t want to be married to those questions if the conversation goes off in another direction entirely. There’s a joke I heard in journalism school about a flustered cub reporter carefully sticking to a prepared script of questions:

  Reporter: When did you become president of the company?

  Interviewee: A few months before I murdered my wife.

  Reporter: [sticking to script] And can you tell me about your newest product?

  Don’t miss the forest for the trees. If your subject is telling you a lot of interesting things about a topic you didn’t even prepare for, let her go on about that instead of cutting her off to ask your next question.

• There’s a time to be a journalist and a time to be a fan. I wrote about this about a year ago, when I attended ROFLcon as a member of the press and got to hang out with the likes of Scumbag Steve and Chuck Testa. You may think it sounds like a compliment to tell the celebrity during an interview, “By the way, I’m a HUGE fan. Can I have your autograph after the interview?” but instead it might put the celebrity, who has to deal with gushing fans all the time, on her guard. A better option would be to conduct the interview normally, and then, once you are off duty, ask for an autograph or compliment her latest film.

Who is the most famous person you’ve ever interviewed? What was it like? Is there anything you wish you had done differently?

(photo via excalipoor on Flickr.)

Do you dream of getting paid to attend conventions? To have companies send you anime, games, or graphic novels for review, unasked? To make a living out of one of your favorite reasons to be alive?

For a handful of professionals, it’s not just a dream. In a new column on Otaku Journalist, I will periodically interview the real working otaku journalists of the world about their geeky careers.

Today’s professional is Humberto Saabedra, who you might know better as a contributor to Crunchyroll News and the webmaster behind AnimeNews.biz. Here’s what he has to say about making a career in fandom:

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OJ: You were a fan before you became a professional writer for anime and technology websites. How did you make the jump?

HS: My current path started in 2006 when I noticed that one of my favorite sites for mobile and telecom news was looking for new writers. Being that I lost my latest in a string of menial retail jobs at the time, I felt that I had nothing to lose with sending in an application showcasing what little writing skill I had. I essentially started my professional writing career in December 2006 writing for PhoneNews.com and 2012 marks my 5th year writing for the site.

I somehow convinced my business partner to let me launch AnimeNews.biz in the Summer of 2008 as a part of his then new publishing network venture. The site launched in October of 2008 on the back of my forum commentary involving the latest implosions in the anime industry and the site quickly became an alternative to Anime New Network. The site was in a perfect position to cover the transition to legal online streaming and focus on the stories that never really get told within and out of the industry.

How did you get the Crunchyroll gig?

I started to interact with [Crunchyroll News founder] Patrick Macias on Twitter in late 2011 and he made me an offer to contribute to Crunchyroll on their News page later on after I started noticing that they were picking up a lot of stories from my site and we talked shop about high-end audio gear. Even though I wasn’t looking for another gig, I accepted his offer as I’d always looked up to him, growing up reading his work in Animerica and his books. Being able to make a splash with the Steve Jobs Tribute Doujin set the tone for the sort of writing I wanted to do for the site once I was brought on, though chasing stories is what I’m best at.

Crunchyroll is not my “day job” in the strictest sense. It is one of the gigs I spend the most time on outside of writing for my site, but the one job that keeps me clothed and fed is writing the news and features on PhoneNews.com and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, as I’m the current Editor-In-Chief.

Tell me about a typical day in the life of a professional writer.

My typical day can start from 6-8 AM CST, in which I take time out to clean my office, have breakfast and take a shower to get ready. I spend about 12-16 hours a day working across three sites starting at 9 AM and that’s actually down from the 20 hours a day I used to work when I first started writing professionally.

What’s the difference between what you do and what fan bloggers do?

If I were to describe the difference between a “pro” anime blogger and a fan blogger outside of being paid, it would be the ability to stand out from the sea of fan bloggers easily and having a perspective that quickly draws people to what you write, no matter what it’s about. In my case, its the fact that I take a measured, even-keeled approach to commentary on the anime and manga industry, free from emotion and doomsaying and heavy on business analysis and knowledge of market economics that has proven itself rather popular.

However, the biggest difference I see between a “fan” and “pro” blogger is level of commitment. Too many fans bail out of blogging because they come to the realization that they can’t keep up a consistent schedule, or they feel the time and effort put into blogging isn’t paying off in some way, so they quit.

What’s your advice to writers who want to follow in your footsteps?

If I were to give advice to anyone that really wants to do this professionally, I would suggest learning how to talk to people first and foremost. I got my job at Crunchyroll News by talking to Patrick Macias about headphone amps on Twitter of all things! It also helped that I looked up to him and he was able to look at my previous work on my site, having read his work in Animerica and Pulp magazine when I was younger.

This might seem counter intuitive, but my Twitter feed isn’t just about anime and manga, it’s a mix of politics, music, opinion, and occasional self deprecation. You not only have to have a grasp of what you’re writing about, it helps immensely if you have other interests not necessarily related to your chosen subject to keep things interesting.

I’ve also seen and talked to too many people online and at a few local cons that ask me how I got to where I’m at and the first thing I ask is: “What have you written about lately?” You are only as relevant as your last article, editorial or review. No one with any sense will hire someone just based on a pitch of being able to write about anime and manga. Just like writing about video games, there are too many people that want to write about them and no real way to figure out who’s good and bad. I don’t consider myself a particularly good writer, but I tend to prefer writing longer pieces over the news of the day if given a choice.

Anyone can do this given enough time and effort, the difference is being able to develop a voice that yours and that can drive people to read your work without it getting lost in the feedback loop. You also have to earn the trust of readers, no one will take you seriously if your work is shoddy and poorly researched, or worse a complete repeat of an identical viewpoint with no trace of original thought.

You have to show people your best work using your voice, every time. Will you make mistakes when you start out? Yes, early and often. The important part is that you bounce back and learn from them. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes over the years, even recently and I’m pretty sure I’ll make more, though I’ve learned valuable lessons from each one.

Now, if you want to do this and make a living at it, that’s much more difficult unless you also want to manage the work of setting up ad networks and affiliate programs, which I find that most people that want to do this don’t want to deal with and instead want to be hired to just write, which really isn’t possible these days.

As for writing for free, which most aspiring anime bloggers do for other smaller sites, forgive my language, but writing for free is a shit way to get a writing career started and it really harms future prospects for paid work. If you’re going to write to build experience, do it yourself, for yourself and don’t do it for someone else. Nothing bothers me more when I see anime blogs putting out calls for writers, but the positions are unpaid or trade review copies as payment.

What’s next on your career path?

My short-term goal at the moment is to have AnimeNews.biz generate enough revenue to live off of comfortably while being able to contribute to Crunchyroll News more extensively and picking up other related skills such as photography for convention coverage. Another goal I have is exploring cosplay photography as a new related hobby.

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If you could talk to a professional fandom blogger, what would you ask? I’ll be sure to include your feedback in the next interview!

Today’s question comes from Twitter:

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As press attending an anime con, should I cosplay or not? Any guidelines or advice you have?

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Short answer: cosplay away! But before you grab your cat ears/Naruto headband/Rainbow Dash wig, listen to my reasoning.

In my free workbook, Jumping from Fan to Pro, I wrote about the difference between objectivity and transparency. When I was learning to become a journalist, the former was most highly valued; a good journalist didn’t make herself part of the story. This concept is fantastic in theory—completely unbiased news!—but doesn’t work in the real world, since journalists are people. We bring our own experiences to every story we write, and trying to conceal that is at best unhelpful, and at worst disingenuous.

Instead, I encourage fellow journalists to practice transparency, a professional form of honesty to your readers about your reporting process. Be upfront about who you could and couldn’t reach for your article. If you interviewed somebody you have personal ties to, note that somewhere obvious. If you screw up, swallow your pride and share that too; even the New York Times has to print dozens of corrections every day.

What does this have to do with cosplay? It’s yet another way to practice transparency. The way you express yourself visually shares something up front about you with your interview subjects, and informs their decision about whether or not to open up to you, and how much.

Here’s one example where my personal interests earned me an advantage: I’m a pretty big fan of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. When I wanted an interview with a cagey brony who was afraid of being made fun of, I sent him a drawing of my pony OC (original character), an Earth Pony journalist. Thanks to that, I was able to get the only interview with this particular brony.

“I normally would not grant [an interview] to anyone but you showed me your pic with a pony drawing and I figured no harm should come from this,” he responded. What made me happy about this reply was not that he assumed I would be on “his side” or anything, but that he was trusting be to be truthful with his story.

Was my article about him non-stop glowing praise and no criticism? Of course not, but it was honest. The point is, the fact that I shared a hobby in common with him got him to open up to me at all in the first place. And he knew that I was reaching out to him in a professional context, so there was nothing misleading about me writing a neutral story.

In conclusion, there’s more than one way to be professional. At an anime convention, there’s nothing out of place about sharing your fandom through cosplay. What counts is that you treat your interview subjects with respect and do your duty to your audience to deliver an honest, neutral story.

I’ve worn a lot of nerdy getups while reporting at conventions, from cat ears and a tutu to a full-blown maid cafe costume. It’s nice to have the freedom not to have to wear office clothes like I always did when I worked at a local paper. But at conventions its not the clothes I wear that signal my craft, it’s a $1 reporter’s notebook, a camera, and a heartfelt and appreciative request for an interview.

My only caveat? If your costumes are as eye-catching as say, those of Yaya Han, you might want to make it a casual cosplay while you’re trying to report. If people are trying to get your picture while you’re trying to work, that’s distracting for both you and your interview subject.

Happy reporting!