The Tumwater Talon has now accrued more than 70 articles in the 2025-2026 school year. Throughout these articles, hundreds of interviews have been conducted on students, teachers, and staff. I have manually collected data on how many interviews each journalist has done and hope you find my findings interesting.
The Methodology
For the purposes of this article, I defined an interview as a question—or series of questions—that a journalist asks anyone and publishes it in the Talon. This means an interview could be as little as one question or as big as 30 questions.
It is important to remember I counted all interviews—even when one person has been interviewed multiple times. While it may have been interesting to see only unique interviews, this would have proved too time-consuming.
In addition to this, I separated staff and student interviews to provide more data.
To gather this data, I went to the “staff” section of the Talon and manually recorded the number of interviews each journalist has conducted on every one of their articles in Google Sheets. Here is the link to the google sheet:Journalism statistics. I have made it viewable to everyone in the Tumwater School District.
This was, by far, the most time-consuming part of the process.
Results
The total number of interviews journalists at the Tumwater Talon have conducted is 310. Among these interviews, 263 are student interviews and 47 are staff interviews.
On average and excluding Lorenzo’s interviews as an outlier, each journalist has conducted approximately 14.2 total interviews and 11.8 student interviews (16.3 and 13.8 including outliers respectively). The average for staff interviews is 1.9–excluding Brittany as an outlier. With outliers, the average for staff interviews is 2.5.
Keep in mind I am not perfect, and some small human error likely occurred.
Also, this data was collected on the 19th and 20th of November and is not up-to-date, but is very recently collected.
It is very important to note that more interviews do not equal a better journalist. It is merely an interesting data point that is easy to collect and interpret. Unsurprisingly, journalists who have more research articles than interview articles have less total interviews than those who prefer interview articles. Some journalists simply prefer to write less interview-heavy articles than others and vice versa.
The person with the most interviews is Lorenzo Larios who has conducted 55 interviews—the majority of which are very short and only contain a few questions.
The person with the least interviews is Lucca Anderson who has written many excellent, well-researched articles.
Another interesting data point was the amount of staff/teacher interviews vs. student interviews. The journalist who has interviewed the most teachers is Britanny Pacheco—who has created a few articles focused on interesting facts and preferences about teachers.
The last graph was more of an accident. I was exploring the different types of charts and found the map chart. I was interested to see how it interpreted my data and, surprisingly, it thought the journalist Lucca Anderson referred to the city of Lucca, Italy.
If taken at face value, this chart shows we have definitely, absolutely conducted 0 interviews in Italy but we have no idea how many interviews have been conducted on every other country on Earth.
