Major Writing 1 response and questions

I believe that this writing assignment is asking us to figure out how the professionals in our chosen field of study write so we can learn how to emulate that and become better writers in our field. We need to know and understand how these professionals, both academic and nonacademic, go about sharing their ideas through the written word. We will be interviewing them to figure out why they write like they do, so we can know more than just how. We will also being reading six written texts, both academic and nonacademic, to help us figure out the finer points of writing in our field, and to apply it to our own writing.

This assignment reminds me of a couple of different papers I had to write in English and AP Composition. The English paper was a research paper where we had to analyze different online sources, and while that isn't exactly what we're doing here, it has some similarities. We also wrote a synthesis paper in AP Composition that was remarkably similar to this, though we only had an hour to do it.

1. Are we allowed to record our interview with the professional so we don't miss out on any information that we couldn't get down at the time?
2.  What do you mean by writing in genres? I'm a little confused about how that word applies here.
3. Is this field we're writing about having to do with our major? If so, since I'm a journalism major, would I be asking the professional about how they write their articles, or how they write about journalism?