The Media Interview

Best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd has some wonderful stories on her website about her adventures doing book tours. This excerpt is a good example of why it’s important to have your key message firmly entrenched in your mind - life has a way of trying to distract you:
My first order of business in Philadelphia [...]

May this be one tip of the iceberg that sinks the hopes of OJ Simpson, Judith Regan, and News Corp: the NY Daily News reports that some Fox affiliates have started bailing on the two-night interview with Simpson. The pressure is working.
BTW, advertisers, why not support your local public and make the interviews [...]

Happened upon a Barbara Walters special last night: 30 Mistakes in 30 Years. She calls it a “record of regrets” - some hers, some her guests - and I was hoping for some candid talk about the interview process. But being a prime time special, this first of two shows was really [...]

This past Tuesday, there was a well-publicized memo to staff at the Washington Post outlining planned changes (cuts and consolidations) in the venerable paper’s newsroom, all in an effort to try and deal with “shifting advertising revenues”. A key phrase in the memo - “every story must earn its length” - tells of the editorial [...]

Just wanted to put in my two cents on this: Fox’s O.J. Simpson show tarnishes all of television. I urge everyone to stop watching the entire Fox network for two months starting now (or anything Fox for that matter) and email them to say why. It’s the only way they’ll listen.
Loved this comment on [...]

We may complain sometimes about the quality of shows on mainstream television, but there are far more well-written and certainly more well-produced programs today compared with, say, thirty years ago, and not just because there are far more programs. That’s due in part to far more competition than there was thirty years ago - [...]

I was re-reading a valuable post by trade journalist Paul Conley on instant messaging as a reporting tool and it got me thinking about how standards can change as the use of a technology becomes more commonplace:
IM is an informal medium. Sources don’t see talking via IM as an interview. The advantage of that is [...]

Media coach Roberta Gale reminds us all of an easily-forgotten point for phone interviews: turn off your call waiting!
Yeah, it’s a godsend when you’re talking to your mother and the network is trying to call to let you know you’ve made the finals of “American Idol,” but it’s a less-than-stellar feature when you’re being [...]

You probably couldn’t help seeing the story this past weekend about Sony’s launch of Playstation 3 in Japan. You might even have seen the pictures of Ken Kutaragi, the father of the Playstation, handing one to the first customer. But while we heard from many others in the long lineups, we never heard [...]

I’ve talked before about prepping for a media interview by looking up your topic in Technorati and other blog indexes to see what people are saying right now. Here’s another idea when you’ve got a bit of lead time before your interviews: conduct your own survey or poll.
That’s what financial author Leo J. [...]