The Media Interview

Just because you’re doing an interview for print or the web, don’t think that your demeanour won’t become part of the finished story. Here’s the opening of a piece on Diana Krall from The Telegraph - the focus on her attitude permeates the entire article. Now Diana Krall may not care about the story coming out this way, but if you’re not a celebrity, I wouldn’t suggest giving the writer this kind of ammunition:

For entirely selfish reasons I have been trying hard to like Diana Krall. I go to see her in concert, you see. I have all her albums. And the next time I go to see her in concert, or play one of her albums, I don’t want to have it ruined by a voice in my head saying: ‘What a cow.’ But from the moment she turned up late, pointedly ignored me while she poured herself a coffee, and then greeted me with a crusher handshake, the world’s bestselling jazz singer and pianist has been in a foul mood. Ominously, when I try to melt the permafrost by congratulating her on her pregnancy (her first, at 41, baby due in December) and asking her the standard jokey questions about whether she has developed any odd cravings or caught herself behaving erratically, she glowers at me, actually glowers, and says in a flat voice: ‘You might just find out.’

After five minutes of her blocking my questions with defensive, one-sentence answers delivered in a Canadian monotone, I wonder if I shouldn’t just ask if she wants to reschedule. Then I remember how tight her schedule is: she flew into London from LA last night to begin a three-week tour of Europe - so jetlag might partly account for her charmlessness. So I smile and say: ‘You don’t like being interviewed much, do you?’ It seems to help. She sighs: ‘I don’t like talking about myself.’

In honour of halloween, let’s see how scary media interviews can be:

I’m more nervous being interviewed than sliding through fire

- Orlando firefighter Mike Sydnor talking about being set on fire during stunts at Disney World.

I walked into [the] room for the interview much as I walk into my dentist’s office. I know it has to be done, but I dread it and my heart races in anticipation of the metal of anxiety scraping over a raw nerve that I don’t know is there.

- AIDS Activist Ron Hudson
in a personal journal from Literati Magazine

A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is taking the Globe and Mail newspaper to task for refusing to correct the electronic edition of a story about him. Todd Maffin has a popular blog, which the article says is endorsed by the CBC - in fact it’s not - and Maffin doesn’t want to be perceived as being in the CBC’s pocket. But would the Globe fix the story online? Apparently not.

It was an error in fact that both the subject and the newspaper’s own journalist agreed needs correction, but the newspaper refused. I wasn’t asking for a print retraction — only for them to fix the inaccuracy in its electronic edition. A dozen keystrokes.

And that’s important because:

In today’s age, electronic versions of these articles are sent to news databases like Canadian Newsstand, CBCA, and so on, and stay there for eternity. The blog comments don’t [the reporter had pointed out the error on the Globe’s blog]. This mean the Globe is choosing to deliberately let an inaccuracy stand in the public record. They could, very simply, make a quite note to the article or a correction, but won’t. I’m still unclear why. All the journalist could tell me was that his editors didn’t think it was “aggregious enough.”

Maffin concludes his post by saying:

Rather than deal with this again situation [sic], I’ll probably just avoid Globe and Mail interviews in the future. Use your own caution.

After having wrestled one another (literally) in January 2006, Bill O’Reilly was back on David Letterman this past Friday. The encounter is getting heavy play on YouTube (want a quick sense of how polarized America has become? - read the comments on the long list of clips from the interview.) and clips are appearing on other networks (a sure sign that a publicity stunt has worked).

I’ve often raised my concern over important issues being “debated” in interviews on comedy/entertainment shows - and those comments on YouTube show how seriously a lot of people were taking this Late Show sparring. So there’s more than a bit of irony in Dave’s opening question from Friday’s show:

Letterman: Uh, how’s it going? Am I right about one thing? You guys over there at Fox News, guys like Rush Limbaugh - uh, you you you guys just know it’s all just a goof, right? You’re just, you’re just horsing around? Am I right about that? You’re doing it because you know it will be entertaining?

Dave, aren’t you and other talk show comics really being serious under the guise of horsing around?

Having gotten that off my chest, there were some great comedy bits in the interview, my two favourites being:

O’Reilly: What are we [at Fox News] doing exactly?

Letterman: You, you, uh - well, see here again you got me because I’ve never seen -

O’Reilly: See, you don’t, you’ve never seen the show, you don’t watch the network.

Letterman: Let me tell you something, I don’t even know how to get to your show.

O’Reilly: Right down, you just go straight down, you take a right.

Letterman: But it’s on, it’s on Fox, I dial up Fox and it’s always The Simpsons. And I don’t - Where are you? Bill?

O’Reilly: Did you enjoy Culture Warrior - the book?

Letterman: I haven’t read the book.

O’Reilly: You really haven’t read it? Come on. You’re in the book!

Letterman: I know. I looked at it [O’Reilly is in a blue windbreaker on the cover] and I thought, ‘What is he? What is this? A book about sailing? And then I said, “No, I don’t need that.”

Quotes are taken from a full transcript I found here.

My family gave me a massage at a local spa for my birthday, with strict instructions to relax. I did, but I also thumbed through a recent issue of Strategy magazine while lounging in my robe and sipping a refreshing beverage. Found an interesting piece by former creative director James P. Othmer about book marketing:

I thought my brand-shaping days were behind me after I sold my first novel [The Futurist]. But, soon after I decided to leave advertising, my publisher sent me an author questionnaire that presented me with an ironic challenge: how to position the brand of me.

…In marketing, image cultivation and self-promotion come with the territory.

But in the book world, especially literary fiction, any type of promotion, let alone self-promotion, is a radical and potentially dangerous proposition.

Authors, most notably fiction writers, need to keep all of this mind when preparing for media interviews; it’s important to be positioning yourself in the minds of the audience through not only what you say but how you say it.

BTW, Othmer goes on to detail some of the ways in which he has been using social media, like blogging, MySpace etc. to help promote the book.

Mark Glaser in the Online Journalism Review
Posted: 2004-10-12

More and more, blogs are giving sources the power to strike back and making journalists think twice about what they run in a story and how they conduct an interview. Case in point: Billionaire technology entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who also owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks basketball team, launched a blog last spring and quickly posted an e-mail exchange he had with Dallas Morning News sports columnist Kevin Blackistone.

While Cuban wrote that the best thing about a blog was that “I get to respond to the media,” Blackistone wasn’t too thrilled that Cuban had posted their e-mail exchange. “I didn’t think much of being surprised by having what I thought was a private exchange with Mark Cuban posted on a public Web site,” Blackistone told me via e-mail. “That is a reason I stopped responding to readers years ago, because I discovered they started posting my personal responses to them on message boards.”

The part about Cuban only doing email interviews is well known, but what intrigued me in this piece was the reaction of Blackistone - I hadn’t heard that side of the Cuban story before. How many interviewees have said about journalists what Blackistone says here about Cuban?

To suggest that a 15- or 20-minute interview can cause someone to commit suicide is focusing on the wrong thing.

- CNN host and former prosecutor Nancy Grace
from an ABC news story about a mother who committed suicide one day after being interviewed by Grace about the mother’s missing two year old boy; family members blamed the media for the suicide. (cited on CBS news website).

Author Elonka Dunin - The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles - blogs about her experiences being interviewed by the BBC, including this amazing passage:

[The BBC] scheduled a time, but ended up calling us late, and then when we went on the air, we each got to say just one or two sentences, and then the interviewer interrupted us with, “Sorry, out of time, and I’m not understanding this anyway,” and they cut us off and ended the segment rather suddenly.

Not what you’d expect from the Beeb. They offered to bring her back for another segment, though that didn’t turn out as planned either, as you can read here. But in the end, she adds,

…they did at least mention my book.

These days it’s second-nature to start researching by going on-line, but it’s always interesting to remind ourselves why. Say, for example, you want to find interviews for your research: type +”an interview with” into Google and as of this posting you’ll get over 26 million listings. Even if half of them weren’t interview transcripts or stories about interviews or they were duplicates, that makes about 13 million interviews online.

Oh, and if you want to be researched, do interviews with people who post them online, or post your own copy of the interview… you are keeping copies of your interviews aren’t you?

The Playmates I interviewed, almost without exception, said they were more nervous being interviewed than when they posed.

- Chip Rowe, the Playboy Advisor for Playboy magazine
in an email interview with Samantha Bornemann, published on the ShinyGun website in February 2002.