The Media Interview

I’m not sure how straight many of the answers were 20 years ago - questions were just avoided with less pinache perhaps - but this journalist makes a good point about the effects of media training on political interviews:
…twenty years ago you could interview people and ask them straight questions and have a reasonable chance [...]

A very revealing blog post by a journalist (sorry, couldn’t find her name on the blog) who has herself just been interviewed:
now I understand why the people I interview always ask me to work miracles on their quotes. Because yesterday, after I talked to the young lady from the magazine, I swear, I wanted to [...]

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 [...]

Found this interesting passage from a 1993 interview with David Letterman. The focus is on entertainers and celebrities going on talk shows, but the underlying message is important for anyone being interviewed - you need to give your audience something of value:
“I can always tell when a guest is going to be a [...]

Imagine you’re doing an interview and the guest drops dead right in front of you. Heard Dick Cavett say Sunday night that’s exactly what happened one time on his show. I did a bit of googling and found out it was in January 1971 - pioneering health food advocate Jerome Rodale died of [...]

Radio host Wayne Kelly rants about a guest who was all pitch and no content:
I always threaten I’m gonna lose it and today I will. I booked an interview about why you should check your credit score more than once per year. With identity theft and credit card offers everywhere, I knew my listeners [...]