The Media Interview

Newsroom Confidential offers insider information from the media. Useful for interviewees to gain perspective on the media, and for journalists to learn from their peers. Looking for online newspapers? Check out The Newspaperindex – comprehensive listings from around the world.

Can’t imagine how this interviewer felt. Here he is, on live TV, interviewing a man who has suffered a very traumatic surgical error – his testicles were removed by accident. Nothing funny about that. But the interviewer clearly wasn’t prepared for hearing the man’s voice…

I like this idea: The Artists Interview Artists Project. Here’s how it works: an artist submits five questions they would like to ask some other artist, and in turn they must answer five questions which have been submitted by another artist, and all the resulting interviews are posted. The goal is to generate particularly interesting [...]

In a post called The Golden Rule Applies to Media Interviews, on the Schwartz Communications blog, John Moran relates how some clients were brainstorming about which media outlets they’d like to get coverage from, yet they referred to the outlets as “rags”. Moran says that kind of attitude is a mistake, but I think he [...]

I’m watching Bill Parcells right now, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys, in a live news conference carried on CNN – he’s being asked questions about the apparent attempted suicide of receiver Terrell Owens. He seems genuinely frustrated by being thrust in front of the press and not having any information – keeps having to [...]

Stuck for questions during an interview? Why not pick a card from one of those conversation starter games you can buy? Heard the hosts of a CBC radio show do just that the other day. They were doing it for fun of course – BTW it really did start a good thread of the conversation [...]

Aside from the socks, there were far more important media interview lessons to come out of Bill Clinton’s talk with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday (see below for video of the interview). 1. Body language and hand gestures can change the tone of an interview. Yes, the interview did get confrontational, but I think [...]

Ok, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to sweat the small stuff, especially if it’s going to distract from the real story or create fodder for critiics; like making sure your pants don’t hike up above your socks. Sounds silly, I know, but take Bill Clinton’s infamous interview, which aired on Fox this past Sunday. While they [...]

Librarian T. Scott blogging about public speaking and shyness, as well as his media training experience: [Years ago] I knew that I had a choice — I could let my shyness rule and prevent me from achieving so many of the things that I’d like to accomplish, or I could figure out how to get [...]

I’ve vented before about spam blogs and how they waste your research time on the net. Usually you can quickly spot them because they’re filled with irrelevant material surrounding the post you were led to by the search engine. But I came across this more sophisticated version the other day: When I was a parenting [...]