The Media Interview

I’ve spoken before on this blog about the work of John Sawatsky and the influence he’s had on the interviewing skills of many journalists. Well, his Technorati score is way up this week after a big story about him on the popular NPR show All Things Considered. He’s reaching guru status.

The Art of the Interview, ESPN-Style, by David Folkenflik has been widely quoted since it aired August 14 and a lot more people are discovering the important lessons that Sawatsky has for interviewers (the ESPN part refers to the fact that Sawatsky was hired by the sports network to train its reporters to do better interviews). I’ll just quote a couple key points from the NPR piece:

Sawatsky says the big-name reporters are failing to plan meticulously how to extract information from their sources, calling their process “haphazard.”

“You are hoping that the person being interviewed is a good talker,” he says, “and knows how to do something with your inept question.”

Sawatsky’s rules are simple, but he says they get broken all the time: Don’t ask yes-or-no questions, keep questions short and avoid charged words, which can distract people. In his seminar, Sawatsky points to Mike Wallace of CBS’ 60 Minutes and CNN’s Larry King as examples to avoid. In Sawatsky’s illustrative clips, King favors leading questions that generate curt answers, while Wallace’s rapid patter fails to get a subject to speak candidly.

But the NPR website has far more than Folkenflik’s story on Sawatsky - you can listen to Larry King and Mike Wallace comment on Sawatsky’s criticisms, you can hear Sawatsky critique Folkenflik’s methods during their interviews (how’s that for daunting!), there are some additional pieces from Sawatsky and about Sawatsky, and finally there’s the famous clip from the movie Bull Durham about all the cliches in sports interviews.

And there are some interesting follow-ups:

David Folkenflik examines Mike Wallace’s highly-publicized interview with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and gives it a Sawatskian critique (Wallace’s interview aired the day after the NPR piece on Sawatsky).

And you can see public reaction to Wallace’s interview on Public Eye, the recently-launched CBS blog about their news department and journalism in general (thanks for David Fokenflik for pointing me to it - another subscription for Bloglines to handle!).

And this story sure brought interview fans out of the woodwork:

Yes, yes, yes — it’s nice to hear others interested in this topic. I enjoy a good interviewer, but have also been amazed that many of the most famous ones are not very good. [from a comment posted on Fokenflik's blog]