The Media Interview

Here’s a blog reader, commenting on the blog of a writer who is a social media marketer, working in part on Second Life…

You did pretty good [on the TV interview], it’s fun to see someone we know being on the News!

There’s still something about being on broadcast TV, even in the middle of the social media revolution…

I’ve never been a huge fan of talk shows (or any show) that has a street-level window for a backdrop. Inevitably, something distracting is happening on the street… like the other morning in Ottawa, Canada:

Morning Show Mooning Revisited - Watch more free videos

Thanks - I think - to Keith Olbermann on Countdown for tipping me off to this video.

If you do well in a media interview, and you have a wide niche that you can talk about, you might be called on by the media outlet to become a regular guest expert. How does that happen? Well for author Brenda Nixon it went like this:

In my hometown of Kansas City, I do a regular TV segment on Wednesdays. During our noon news, I speak on a parenting issue.

This assignment came on the heels of an interview with the station’s news anchor. She did a feature on my toilet teaching audiotape. Then while on maternity leave, she encountered the desperate lack of practical parenting on the news. Upon her return to work she called to propose I do this weekly segment.

Ok, so I stretched things a little to get a catchy headline. The point is, that Brenda did so well in her initial interview that she was uppermost in that producer’s mind when the idea struck.

From her article Media Mistakes.

Author Will Weaver on being prepared for unprepared interviewers:

My 2 1/2 minute TV interview was with a woman anchor with big hair and pancake make-up, who scanned my novel’s inside cover during a cut-away to a commercial, then returned, on-air, to brightly to ask me questions about the novel

–but I know the game, and so have my sound bites fairly well in order, things she can grab ahold of and use to sound intelligent…..

Finally got to see the much-talked-about Paris Hilton interview on Letterman last week. I’m no fan of Hilton’s public persona, but I felt for her to a certain extent. Letterman starts in with questions about her stay in prison, and never ever lets up. Even after 4 minutes, when Hilton says she doesn’t want to talk about prison, there’s another four minutes of prison questions and she gets closer and closer to tears.

The biggest problem here is that Hilton doesn’t take the bull by the horns - she just passively waits for the next question. After a couple of prison questions, she’s got to see where this is going, and that was her opportunity to go on the offensive, talk about prison on her own terms, make some jokes about herself, and turn things around. But she’s a deer in the headlights.

Don’t know who’s advising Paris Hilton these days, but she really seems unprepared for being asked questions about her time in prison. Could be they thought that this was an entertainment show and the focus would be on her new perfume and movie, etc., but Letterman? It didn’t even cross your mind that he’d at least make a joke about her jail time?

Lesson learned: Always be prepared when you know there’s something controversial about you - have some way to diffuse the situation, or in this case, a great chance to poke some fun at yourself.

According to Mollygood, Hilton broke down completely after leaving the set. I also liked Mollygood’s final comment:

Sad to know that she has to go onto a comedy show to get even slightly tough questions about her prison stay.

Busy day in the gossip mills as rumors flew about which American TV network would first get to interview Paris Hilton (and pay dearly for it) when she’s released from prison. Following a detailed story in the NY Times this morning about ABC losing out on it’s bid of $100,000, reportedly to NBC, the omnipresent, omniscient TMZ.com began a day-long series of exclusives: NBC had a producer and crew lined up and the interview was on, it was off, it never existed…. whew!

You know that someone is going to interview her - just doesn’t look like you’ll see it on the Today show.

Of course, part of building a brand is knowing how to look good on the boob tube. “Authors who are media-genic are going to increase their chances ten-fold of being published and published successfully,” says publicist Lisa Ekus, who also notes that she gets twice as many bookings for authors who are media-trained. Interestingly, her base of clients has shifted from the large houses to the mid-sized or small houses, whose authors are reaching for the big chocolate cheesecake in the sky. “These people are getting increasingly savvy about what it takes to promote books and get them out there. The larger publishers, on the other hand, are letting it happen on a rote basis.” [emphasis mine]

- excerpt from Chefs Shake Up the Cookbook Market
in PUBLISHING TRENDS July 2000

Preparing for a live television interview is tough. Even if you’ve had a lot of experience on TV, every situation is different enough - even down to the way you’re seated - that you need to be well prepared to handle what comes at you. Even then, there’s always something more…

The other day a client of mine faced the following:

1. As they were counting down to going live he was told that the 6 minute interview had been cut to 3 minutes.

2. The opening question was about his product when he’d been told minutes before that they didn’t want to “do a commercial” and the focus would be on the social issues surrounding the product.

3. The host began nudging him below the desk trying to get him to look at the desk monitor after telling him earlier not to be distracted by what’s on the desk monitor - someone in the control room had decided to play some clips from the product they didn’t want him to talk much about…

Lesson learned: Live interviews - TV in particular - are highly unpredictable and no matter how well prepared you are, you also need to be prepared for the “unpreparable”. There, you’ve had your daily dose of the paradoxical.