The Media Interview

PR blogger Gerry McCusker makes the point on PR Disasters that companies (or anyone) should treat interview requests from bloggers like they would a request from mainstream journalists - what is the blogger’s point view, what is their purpose, will the interview be posted, how will it be posted?
The example he gives of a [...]

Jason McIntyre co-creator, writer, and editor, of the blog The Big Lead interviewed on Sports Media Guide:
Q. Do you do your interviews by e-mail or phone?
A. Kornheiser was over the phone – he doesn’t do e-mail. I prefer e-mail. I started doing it by e-mail because I was anonymous at the time and didn’t feel [...]

Freelance writer Hrag Vartanian blogs about being misquoted:
I was interviewed by Steve Malanga for a recent profile of Bushwick, Brooklyn for City Journal and found this paragraph that proved to me (yet again) that you should always be cautious about giving interviews, even to nice guys–which Steve obviously is:
Some early arrivals claim that landlords hoodwinked [...]

A week or so ago I mentioned the controversy over statements made by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a taped encounter with journalist Tom Zytaruk in 2005 in the driveway of MP Chuck Cadman’s widow’s home. The statements allegedly showed Harper acknowledging that payments had been offered to Cadman when he was alive [...]

A fascinating new trend in interviewing has emerged during the course of the US presidential primaries: the live-to-web editorial board interview. Sitting around the table with editors of a media outlet is a long-standing tradition, but the idea of streaming it live over the internet adds some interesting new dimensions.
Take the editorial board meeting [...]

During a meeting with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader’s editorial board on May 23, 2008, which was streamed live over the internet, Hillary Clinton mentioned the assassination of Robert Kennedy in a passing comment about nomination campaigns historically lasting into June. That mention became the centre of a firestorm.
Here’s the headline from the newspaper that apparently [...]

Author Carl Weisman blogs about his experiences as a published writer, including doing media interviews:
Wow! That was intense. Imagine doing twelve interviews in one morning, including four 10 minute interviews back to back without a break. If you ever find yourself doing radio publicity for one of your books you just may [...]

Jon Greer blogs on B-Net - Catching Flack about when it’s not a good idea to insist on email interviews. He tells how the Ann Arbor News was writing a series about universities letting athletes take easy courses to maintain their scholarships:
The paper sought an in-person or phone interview with [University of Michigan] president [...]

I’m always saying you can’t let things distract you during an interview. Here’s a story from the BBC about police Superintendent Bryan Lawson, who was being interviewed on location about drug raids:
As I was talking, I could see a guy in the corner of my eye walking past carrying something the size of a portable [...]

That is, if there’s a recorder on. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper learned this the hard way recently, when a 2005 encounter with a journalist came back to haunt him. Tom Zytaruk was working on a biography about MP Chuck Cadman who had recently passed away, when he heard that Harper - at [...]