Getting someone to open up to you is not very hard; it is a technique learned in the journalism school of hard knocks.
Most of the time people are thrilled that their names will be splashed in print and are eager to tell you their points of view, especially if the subject is dear to their hearts, and all you have to do is listen, nod and raise your eyebrow now and then.
But bring out a tape recorder, so that you do can record those wonderful quotes, and most people will clam up or start humming and hawing.
They try to find just the right things to say and everything becomes a little too artificial, a little too pretentious. Others will just walk away, explaining they have nothing to say on the issue.
To prevent this, my colleague uses a clunky tape recorder that went out of production many years ago. This becomes a source of amusement for the person being interviewed, rather than being something intimidating.
The tape recorder belongs in the age of black and white TV. You have to press two buttons down at the same time to start recording, a pretty red light comes on and a magnetic tape starts registering every word being said.
My colleague tells me that when he brought it out when interviewing a group of Japanese executives recently, they looked at it with great interest and did not believe such a product made in their homeland still existed. As a result, they became quite chatty.
When I was working for a different newspaper in one of the other Gulf states, the reporters would return to the office and toss over their tape recorders to Egyptian transcribers, who would in turn give them a dirty look, start smoking and argue volubly as to who would transcribe which tape.
Sometimes, as deadline for printing neared, I would see a transcriber desperately trying to spool back the tape after the recorder started eating it or spitting it out. When that happened, the interview turned out to be quite interesting, full of platitudes and big, empty words.
I remember the first time we were given pagers. We were quite excited and felt important because not many people had these electronic handcuffs hanging from their belts.
From then onwards life became really hectic and reporters could be seen running madly around the city to the nearest telephone as soon the pager went 'burp, burp', worried that they would miss their editor's instructions.
After a couple of months of high stress, the common excuse for not returning office calls was that the pager's batteries had run out.
Pagers also made a lot of imams very upset and every Friday they would rant about this annoying gadget, that intruded even at prayer time.
I read somewhere recently that etisalat still has pager connections (one of them must be my colleague's) but will soon phase them out.
Now that most journalists multi-task in this age of multi-media, you will be confronted by reporters who scribble on their notepads, stick a camera in your face and hold up a hand, saying, "Don't look into the camera, please talk to my hand".
The other day I handed my tiny camera over to the video editors and they said my footage looked like it had been recorded by a bee, madly flitting from flower to flower. "Hold the camera steady," was the advice. "Don't be tempted to follow the action around."
When I viewed the footage, it looked like it was from a Hitchcock horror movie. The famous director's trademark was a single, long shot, following the victim with a shaky hand-held camera, leaving the audience squirming and awaiting the inevitable.
