The Media Interview

I just posted about the controversy surrounding the demand by Angelina Jolie’s lawyers that journalists sign a contract outlining the scope and rules of any interview with the star at the premiere of her latest movie A Mighty Heart.
There’s another story here, though, about the way the media works. I cited a number of [...]

Angelina Jolie is being called a hypocrite by some media (for instance, here, here, and here) after she imposed strict limits on interviews during the June 13th premiere of A Mighty Heart, in which she plays the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Roger Friedman of Fox News blasted Jolie for [...]

The Today Show’s Matt Lauer, talking with Larry King about the most fascinating person he’s ever interviewed:
LAUER: You know I’m one of these people who tends to think that the ordinary people are more fascinating than the celebrities and even the politicians. Celebrities and politicians are practiced, you know. I mean they’ve been asked these [...]

Found this on the blog of 2nd Lieutenant James Kirby with the 82nd Airborne Division:
Today we began our training on hand to hand contact and had our first pt session. We ran about 4 miles at a slow pace and sprinted a quarter mile at the end. It was so hot and humid at 7 [...]

In answer to Margie Zable Fisher’s Top Ten Reason’s Why PR Doesn’t Work, Brian Solis came up with Why PR Doesn’t Work and How to Fix It (thanks to Point Being for pointing it out).
Solis makes a lot of very useful points, but for my purposes, this piece of advice for clients was particularly [...]

Another voice weighs in on the email interview debate:
Being interviewed is usually a miserable experience. One can expect to be misquoted, one does not always have time to reflect on answers, and it can be very stressful. I try to give only email interviews now, after so many experiences with being misquoted – which is [...]

Margie Zable Fisher’s guest post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog caused a lot of reaction recently with her Top Ten Reason’s Why PR Doesn’t Work. Most of the reasons concerned misperceptions about the PR process, and miscommunication between client and PR firm, but the one that interested me most was #3:
The client has not been [...]

Just so you know I’m not making this up, here’s the link.
In fact, in most cases, wars are started around media interviews.

Found this quote from an LAPD blog about the recent May Day confrontation in MacArthur Park (thanks to Shenanigans for posting it). I guess for some officials getting your sound-bite about keeping the peace on the six o’clock news is more important than actually keeping the peace:
The airship [helicopter] was assi[s]ting those officers, flying low [...]

A TV reality show for authors? There’s a casting call on June 16th in Florida apparently for aspiring scribes vying to beThe Ultimate Author. But don’t think that being a great writer is enough to win the show’s prize of a book deal:
Contestants in this competition must be smart enough to spell well, [...]