Got assigned a piece about a local food bank and assumed I understood the angle before I arrived. Rising demand, underfunding, familiar territory. Spent the first ten minutes asking questions built entirely around that assumption.
When the story is not the story you expected
The coordinator I was interviewing kept steering toward something else entirely: a structural problem with how referrals were processed that was turning away eligible families. That was the actual story. I almost missed it because I was not listening for anything outside my original frame.
Preconceptions are not the same as preparation. Reading background material is useful. Deciding in advance what someone is going to tell you is not.
What good preparation actually looks like
Preparation means knowing enough to ask informed questions, not enough to predict the answers. Any experienced contributor to a news and information portal will describe this as the difference between context and conclusion. Arrive with context. Leave the conclusions for after.
The practical adjustment
Write down your assumptions before an interview, not your questions. Then treat each assumption as something that needs to be tested rather than confirmed. Ask questions that could disprove what you think you already know.
That single habit changed how my interviews developed. The stories became less predictable, which made them considerably more worth reading.