There's a guy who trains journalists in asking good questions; his name is John Sawatsky. You can have a look into an article about him at the American Journalism Review. I was fortunate to be Sawatksy-ed by him and I won't forget it. His main technique is to ask open questions, instead of “closed” ones. A closed question might go like this: “Did you really sleep on the job while you were supposed to be monitoring the Springfield Nuclear Reactor?

Homer might give you a simple, “No”, and then where would you be? A better place to start might be a question that doesn’t appear to assume so much. Like: “What happened?” Homer can't give you a yes or a no; he's gotta say something – and it's likely to be some sort of explanation. And Sawatsky's follow-up? “Why?”

It's so simple that the reporter who interviewed Sawatsky for the AJR wrote, “The advice may be simple, but the execution is about as natural as walking on hot coals.” In other words: asking open questions is one of the hardest things to do well. Read the article.