The Media Interview

Why you need to hire a publicist for your media tour
With a fiery late-August sun bearing down on the red carpet, stars gathering for the Emmy Awards had to be creative to keep cool.
Jennifer Love Hewitt’s publicist held a mini-fan for the actress to use during media interviews. (AP story)
Before publishing this post [...]

I was reading a bit of Naked Conversations over the weekend (at this rate I should finish by Christmas!) and there’s a section where Robert Scoble and Shel Israel talk about a shift they see happening in the PR industry - a shift from “command and control” to “listen and participate”. It got [...]

Checked the Washington Post this morning to see how their video mash-up promotion was going - couldn’t find any entries posted. The idea is to create a fake interview using clips of Post reporter Dana Milbank asking questions. Does this mean no one has entered or the entries aren’t publishable? I would [...]

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 [...]

Caught another Glenn Beck episode on CNN Headline News last night. Fewer cheesy comedy bits on this edition, but more of the “rolling eyes, sniggering laughs” school of social commentary. Yes, “social commentary”, because we have to remember that this program on a national news network is not about journalism - as Glenn [...]

Can’t remember how many times I’ve seen religious figures answer an interview question with “The Lord told me so” - the interviewer just accepts that and moves right on to the next question. Michael Eisner wasn’t so easy on religious broadcasting pioneer Pat Robertson in this excerpt from a June 2006 interview. [BTW, [...]

Wired News pulls the plug on stories which used faked interviews. Interesting to see how these fakes were caught using policies implemented following earlier fakery:
In a phone conversation with Wired News editors, [journalist Philip] Chien had identified Ash as a professor of aeronautical engineering at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Reached by phone [...]

Still sifting through the reactions to Steve Rubel’s “Reinventing the Media Interview”, including my own. While we may see an increase in interviews conducted via email, I don’t think Steve’s suggestions on the use of blogs to conduct interviews will go far, given some of the reasons mentioned below. However, what I do [...]

Been lots of reaction to Steve Rubel’s thoughts on reinventing the media interview, including journalist Ian Delaney’s comments on email interviews. He lists four things he doesn’t like about them:
1) No interviewee will take the time to write the kinds of responses they’d give in a live interview
2) Even a few hours delay in replying [...]

I always enjoy reading blog entries about the day to day reality of doing media interviews. In this post by the publicist for a singer named Johann Michael everyone is green so they’re all learning on the fly - let’s learn with them:
Johann’s actually a journalist’s dream come true – you don’t have to pry [...]