Why on earth would you use a semantically insignificant element (SPAN) to markup something as significant as the name of the interview object?

I'd easily mark this up as a DIALOG:

   <dialog>
      <dt>Iwata
      <dd>In this interview, we're going…
   </dialog>

Is a paragraph a logical or a visual concept? Can a paragraph have a name/speaker attached to it? The author answered these questions differently than you, and kudos to them for thinking about the problem. Markup is "terrible" when people don't think about structure at all.