The Media Interview

Quentin Crisp on the delicate art of bridging in a media interview:
A television interview, you see, is like a geography examination. You can’t study the whole world. Therefore, on the night before your exam, you take your atlas down from its shelf and open it at random. The map that you happen to expose is [...]

Over the weekend I read Charles Grodin’s book, I Like It Better When You’re Funny, about his TV talk shows on CNBC and MSNBC in the late 90’s. He tells the story of Playboy Channel sending a crew to New York to interview Morgan Fairchild, only to find she was ill and unable to [...]

Couldn’t resist posting this line I found in a blog entry by a person who served as a “catcher” during an Iron Man race:
…I physically caught the athletes as they crossed the finish line. A lot of them cross completely exhausted and they just collapse or throw up and they need people right there to [...]

Bibliography of Articles and Books on Interviewing from the Poynter Institute. An excellent selection of online and offline materials, begun in 2002 and updated as recently as this month.

We’ve talked about various forms of interviewing conducted in the virtual online world of Second Life - now Reuters has set up an office in this world of avatars and is writing stories exclusively for the over 850,000 current Lifers. Those of us on the outside of the fish bowl can look inside through [...]

Some excerpts from Getting the measure of a soul on deadline - Interviewing tips from a psychologist (Louise Reid Ritchie, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Florida A&M School of Journalism, Media & Graphic Arts):
One of the most important things I learned as a clinical psychologist was to follow up with direct questions when a person’s behavior didn’t [...]

To authors who are still surprised that not all interviewers have read their book cover to cover, I offer these words from Buzz Machine’s Jeff Jarvis back in 2005:
…don’t think that every time you see Matt Lauer interviewing an author, he has read the book. Authors who get publicity on TV know that their books [...]

[Being interviewed is] an interesting time to see how I feel about things. A chance to get acquainted with my own views.
- Singer/Songwriter Rose Polenzani, August 2001
from an interview by Pam Huwig on WomanRock.com, originally published on Technodyke.com

To find out who is the toughest interviewer on Jamaican radio or TV, PR firm Berbick Graham & Associates recently did a survey of journalists, corporate executives, public personalities and public relations practitioners:
[Participants] were asked to name their top three interviewers from the list, based on interviewing skills such as: Ability to probe issues; knowledge [...]

I love the commenting system that Jack Slocum has built on his blog using the Yahoo UI and, at this point, heavily modifying Wordpress. You click on the marker next to the area of content and up pop all the comments about that content. Since the comments are posted via Ajax, you don’t [...]