Meg Heckman is on the phone, looking for advice: two survivors from the World Trade Center attack are headed home to Maine where she's a reporter for the Journal-Tribune in York County. How can she get an interview, and if she does, what's the best way to handle it?

Meg spent six weeks at Poynter this summer, one of 17 news reporting and writing fellows getting a last burst of training before they launch their journalism careers. It's a grueling program - American Journalism Review once described it as a "brutal but crucial six-week writing course" - but listening to Meg I wonder what, if anything, could prepare young journalists for the kind of story that broke on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

I have no doubt that Meg, who displays that blend of compassionate tenacity that marks the best reporters, will get the story and handle it with sensitivity. So my advice is short and simple:

Just be a human being.

No one owes reporters anything, especially at a time like this. If journalists in a democracy have the right to ask any question, then everyone else is free to say no comment.

Take a moment, I suggest, to imagine what it might be like to be a survivor of the World Trade Center attack, to be returning home, to your family, your friends; how would you feel if a reporter asked you for an interview? How would you want to be treated?

Rejection is the reporter and writer's daily bread, so write a brief note making a polite request for an interview, that you can ask to be delivered by a family member or friend if the first response is no.

I tell Meg I have no doubt she'll get the interview. When you do, just let them tell their story. Rather than interrupting, jot down follow-up questions in the margins of your notebook

After Meg hangs up, I recall a painful assignment at the Providence Evening-Bulletin in the 1980s: the accidental killing of a young woman caught in crossfire between a prison parolee and police.

Full of dread, I approached her family's house, wondering what I could possibly say that might persuade them to share their story, and their pain, with a stranger.

An idea came suddenly, just before I knocked. When the woman's father opened the door, I identified myself, apologized for bothering them at this terrible time, and said I wanted them to know that the paper was going to write a story about what had happened to their daughter.

Then I added, "I just didn't want you to pick up the paper and say, 'Couldn't they at least have asked us if we wanted to say anything?' "

Without hesitation, he let me in. Within a few minutes, he and his wife ushered me into their daughter's bedroom. A package, just arrived with the day's mail, sat on her bed: a set of pots and pans for the hope chest she was filling for her upcoming marriage.

All too often, reporters take the tough guy approach. I think a softer, more human one is more effective. John Brady, author of The Craft of Interviewing, says it best: "Interviewing is the modest immediate science of gaining trust, then gaining information."

Postscript: Meg Heckman got her story, even though the family turned down a network's interview request.