How to Cite an Interview in Chicago Style
How to Cite an Interview in Chicago Style
Chicago handles interviews three different ways depending on whether you conducted the interview yourself, read it in a published source, or watched or heard it broadcast. Personal interviews you did yourself usually stay in the notes and skip the bibliography. Published and broadcast interviews get the full treatment.
Chicago has two systems. Notes and Bibliography (the humanities flavor) uses footnotes plus a bibliography. Author-Date (common in sciences and social sciences) uses parenthetical citations and a reference list. The examples below cover Notes and Bibliography first, since that's what most history, literature, and arts students use. Author-Date notes follow at the end.
Personal interviews you conducted
If you sat down with someone (in person, on Zoom, over email, by phone), Chicago treats this as unpublished personal communication. The 17th edition specifically says to cite these in the text or in a note only, and to leave them out of the bibliography. Your reader can't look them up anyway.
Footnote format:
- Maria Chen (registered nurse), interview by the author, Boston, MA, March 14, 2026.
Include the interviewee's name, a brief identifier if it adds context (their role, title, or affiliation), the phrase "interview by the author," the location, and the date. For phone or video calls, swap the location for "phone interview" or "video interview."
If you've promised anonymity, you can write something like "interview by the author, March 14, 2026, name withheld by mutual agreement" and explain the choice in your methods section.
Published interviews
When the interview ran in a magazine, newspaper, journal, podcast, or book, you cite it the way you'd cite that source type, but you flag the interviewer.
Magazine or journal interview, footnote:
- Toni Morrison, "The Art of Fiction No. 134," interview by Elissa Schappell, Paris Review, no. 128 (Fall 1993): 83.
Bibliography entry:
Morrison, Toni. "The Art of Fiction No. 134." Interview by Elissa Schappell. Paris Review, no. 128 (Fall 1993): 83–125.
The interviewee goes in the author slot because that's who readers are looking up. Title the entry by the interview's headline if it has one. If it doesn't, use a descriptive phrase like "Interview by Elissa Schappell" with no quotation marks.
Podcast interview, footnote:
- Ezra Klein, interview by Tyler Cowen, Conversations with Tyler, podcast audio, October 2, 2024, 1:12:30, https://example.com/episode.
Include the runtime if you're citing a specific moment, plus the URL or DOI.
Broadcast interviews
For radio or TV interviews, treat the program as the published work and name the network and date.
Footnote:
- Volodymyr Zelensky, interview by Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, CBS, April 24, 2022.
Bibliography:
Zelensky, Volodymyr. Interview by Lesley Stahl. 60 Minutes. CBS, April 24, 2022.
If you watched it on a streaming archive rather than live broadcast, add the platform and the URL at the end. Same goes for a YouTube clip of a televised segment.
Author-Date version
Author-Date keeps the same data but reshuffles it. The in-text citation is just (Morrison 1993), and the reference list entry mirrors the bibliography entry above with the year right after the author's name:
Morrison, Toni. 1993. "The Art of Fiction No. 134." Interview by Elissa Schappell. Paris Review, no. 128 (Fall): 83–125.
Personal interviews in Author-Date go in the text the same way: "(Maria Chen, interview by the author, March 14, 2026)."
A few traps worth dodging
Don't list a personal interview alphabetically in your bibliography. Chicago is explicit that unpublished interviews stay in the notes.
Don't drop the interviewer's name. Even when the interviewee is the "author," readers need to know who asked the questions and where to find the original.
For email interviews, write "email interview" or "email message to the author." If you're quoting an Instagram DM or Slack thread, treat it the same way: name the sender, the medium, and the date.
Pin down the date format. Chicago uses Month Day, Year (March 14, 2026), not 14 March 2026 or 3/14/26.
When in doubt about a weird format (TikTok Live, a Twitch stream archive), pick the closest analog (podcast, broadcast, or social media post) and adapt. Consistency across your paper matters more than perfection on edge cases.