Every year for the past five years I’ve taken groups of between 12 and 120 students studying for bachelor’s and master’s degrees and shown them a set of slides. It’s a whistle-stop tour of interviewing people as a journalist.

The slides have changed over the years, and are tweaked depending on the level of qualification I’m teaching at, but they have one key message: interviewing is really difficult.

By my count, there are at least 13 different things a journalist has to do at any one time during an interview – from ensuring they’re getting the basic information they need to build a story, to listening and reacting to what their interviewee is saying, to writing down and recording what is happening. Journalists also, I take pains to note, need to ensure they are actually acting as a human being engaged in a conversation – something I think we too often forget.