The Media Interview

I’m working on some posts about interviews conducted via IM (instant messaging) and I just discovered Campfire, a web-based group chat system.

Lots of great features for conducting IM interviews: it automatically keeps transcripts of your chats, allows you to share files, isn’t dependent on being on Messenger, or AIM, or some other instant messaging platform, and you could conduct roundtable discussions because it accepts up to 60 people at a time.

Found a post on Newsvine entitled Why the Socceroos need media training…... These are my favourite quotes from interviews with Australian soccer players.

“I’d like to play for an Italian club, like Barcelona .” - Vince Grella.

“You’ve got to believe that you’re going to win, and I believe we’ll win the World Cup until the final whistle blows and we’re knocked out.” - Harry Kewell.

“I’m as happy as I can be - but I have been happier.” - Mile Sterjovski.

“I can see the carrot at the end of the tunnel.” - Craig Moore.

“I took a whack on my left ankle, but something told me it was my right.” - Harry Kewell.

“I couldn’t settle in Italy- it was like living in a foreign country.” - Vince Grella.

“I always used to put my right boot on first, and then obviously my right sock.” - Jason Culina.

Lots more like that on the Newsvine posting.

I’m working on a post about VJs - Video Journalists who do their own camera work - and it got me thinking about the issue of interviewees looking into a camera. In an article about Video Journalism in Television Broadcast, former VJ and now consultant, Michael Rosenblum had this comment:

“The conventional rule of ‘don’t look in the camera’ is absurd,” he says. “It’s great for the reporter to have eye contact, but the audience only gets to see the person’s ear. We spend our television lives looking at people’s ears while they say the most important things. It makes no sense. I would PREFER that they look into the camera and thus into the eye of the audience.”

Certainly there are times when poor seating arrangements and bad camera angles result in the audience seeing too much of the sides of people’s heads, but for the most part that’s not the case. We usually see plenty of the facial features so necessary to get full meaning and connection with people. In fact, the straight-on shots we get with satellite interviews, for example, I find boring and rigid, so not seeing the ear doesn’t guarantee an interesting view of the guest either.

Of course looking into the camera during a satellite interview is not only acceptable, it’s necessary. I think it’s all a matter of context. When the interviewer is next to the interviewee and both are on camera, what would be absurd would be for the interviewee to look into the camera because in that context we’re observing an interview and we would wonder why the interviewee isn’t looking at the person asking the questions; the person they’re having a conversation with. I’d go so far as to say there’s something disingenuous about it.

Then I stumbled on this tip for TV interviewees from well-known Australian media trainer Thomas Murrell:

3) Look At The Camera (in a natural way during conversation)

Often you spend most of the time looking at the presenters which is natural. However these are not the people you want to connect with, so a suggestion for live interviews is you look directly into the camera more. This allows the people watching to look into your eyes while you are speaking.

For example, try to arrange your position so that when you are speaking with the interviewers you also have some eye contact with the camera and therefore the audience at home.

He’s right that you’re trying ultimately to connect with the TV audience, but the way to do that is by being very connected to the interviewer; connect to your audience by having an engaging conversation with the person asking the questions. That’s why I don’t see any “natural way” of looking away from the person you’re talking to; you’re breaking the connection.

I guess I haven’t been convinced that looking at the camera, in the course of typical TV interviews, is a good thing. Maybe this is just the result of seeing interviews conducted a certain way for a number (ok, quite a number!) of years… anyone think I’m stuck in my ways?

It is not sufficient to know what one ought to say, but one must also know how to say it.

- Aristotle, The Rhetoric

Hmmm, I should get into media training for US politicians:

Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth “527″ Expenditure Details

$50,000 Reimburse Media Training 08/31/2004

$30,000 Media Training 08/09/2004

From the website Campaign Money.

Jeff H. on the McClenahan Bruer Communications blog, points out that spokespeople for b2b tech companies, who up til now have tended to focus on media training for print/online interviews, may need to do some broadcast media training if more and more interviews are recorded for podcasts.

Good point. And of course this applies to anyone who has traditionally dealt primarily with non-broadcast media; the web is making audio and video interviews incredibly simple and inexpensive to create and to “broadcast”.

Reminds me of that scene in the movie Singing in the Rain, when the silent film stars rush out to get elocution lessons because talkies burst onto the scene.

Here’s an interesting quote from Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott, speaking at a conference on the media on August 24:

These days, many of the most important and difficult debates don’t occur in parliament but in lengthy live media interviews where politicians are expected to have instant answers to every question and a single mistake can be disastrous.

I think what Abbott means by “most important” debates is that for a majority of any country’s population, what they see, hear, and read in the mainstream media is the extent of what they know about an issue - so being as prepared as possible for media interviews is vital if you’re going to get your message to people.

I’ve spoken on this blog about media interview expert John Sawatsky’s work at ESPN, helping sports reporters be better interviewers. On the flip side there’s been a lot of buzz in US college sports circles about the need for media training college athletes - something that’s mandatory in many professional sports - following a number of highly-publicized incidents with college teams (Duke lacrosse, Northwestern soccer).

Lauren Reynolds offers up a good summary of the issue at ESPN.com:

Student-athletes behaving badly is nothing new. The advent of social networking sites that allow people to post pictures, videos and information about themselves to a worldwide community — sites like MySpace and Facebook — have put the private lives of students-athletes in the public domain. Digital cameras and cell phones with picture and video capability allow the public to catch athletes in private moments, whether in a dorm or at a bar, and easily share those pictures with the rest of the world.

It’s a whole new world for coaches and athletic department staffs who previously only worried about what sports reporters had to say. The popularity of fan-generated content, which reports every rumor — accurate or not — is a beast few collegiate programs are equipped to handle.

Enter sports media trainers, a relatively new trend in the collegiate public relations landscape. These specialists work with athletic departments to determine how they would like their schools to be viewed in the press. They also work with coaches and players to make sure they best represent the school’s desired image.

One of the biggest problems pointed out by Shannon Holt, in her article Ambush Makeover: Intercollegiate Media Training, is that young college athletes often seem oblivious to the public nature of the internet - they’ve grown up publishing everything and anything about themselves:

We are constantly hearing of horror stories about students being harassed and stalked because of their personal websites. There is even one guy who deliberately searches on the Internet for pictures posted by athletes, showing themselves and fellow teammates participating in illegal activies (i.e.-hazing rituals, incidents involving drugs and alcohol, etc.). The photos found are posted on his personal website, and shown to school officials.

Most people would be saying “duh” to these athletes posting personal information. Everyone knows that the Internet is a public information source. Common sense, right? I believe it is the responsibility of the University to make student-athletes aware of such incidents. The University should include in its media training the proper way to handle posting sites, whether it be a community.webshots.com page or a blogging site.

[Sidenote: Shannon points out that media training in general needs to catch up with the role played by social media - so true!]

Here are some articles from college papers concerning media training in college athletics:

TCU Daily Skiff

SMU Daily Campus

Newsweek reporter Nicki Gostin tried to ambush interview former 90210 and Charmed star Shannen Doherty for the Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue:

NG: Hi, Shannen, how are you?
SD: I’m good, thank you. I’m unpacking from New York. I can’t stand unpacking.

NG: Can’t you get your maid to do it?
SD: No! I’m a normal person. My housekeeper has better things to do.

NG: Tell me about your new show.
SD: I help relationships come to an end or sometimes help them go to the next level. It can be boyfriend or girlfriend, or if you want to quit your job.

NG: Haven’t you had some bad breakups? You tried to run over a boyfriend a long time ago, right?
SD: No, and if that’s the way you’re going with this then I’d rather not even do the interview.

NG: I just think it’s funny.
SD: I am not going to have things rehashed from 15 years ago. I’m not going to combat lies. I can already tell what’s going to be in your article.

NG: But—
SD: Let me hang up and call my publicist and then we’ll reconvene, because I’m not going down this path.

—CLICK *

Doherty did not call back.

Lots going on here:

1. It shows you that nothing is off the record.

2. Check out the double question: “Haven’t you had some bad breakups? You tried to run over a boyfriend a long time ago, right?” It’s a sign of either sloppy interviewing skills or a desire to railroad the interviewee.

3. The reporter says it’s “funny” that an actress with real-life relationship problems is playing a character who deals with relationships… perhaps the word she’s thinking of is “ironic”, but even then, it’s ironic only if you think the personal life of an actor is relevant to their roles. Suppose, for example, the reporter failed English in college and now writes for a living… ironic, but irrelevant to their current work.

4. Why was this printed in Newsweek? Do they publish transcripts of all failed interviews?

Peter Himler, who put me on to this story via his blog, The Flack, credits Doherty for saying she didn’t like the line of questioning and hanging up. He also wonders if her publicist could have avoided all this with some homework on the reporter. But then again, he muses:

In the end, I suspect that the mere mention in Newsweek of the show’s title and network justified the effort in the minds of the interview’s orchestrators.

Bit off topic here, but may I just say that spam blogs are wasting a lot of my time and making some blog search engines almost useless.