The Media Interview

A friend of mine was given a message at work when he came back from lunch the other day: a newspaper reporter will stop by tommorrow to ask some questions. My friend writes an occasional column in a local paper and has been interviewed a couple of times before, so he didn’t think much of [...]

Ok, maybe this is a little paranoid, but my feeling is that if you’re doing an on-camera interview, try not to have anything very personal visible on camera. Example: I was watching a nationally-televised interview last night and the person being interviewed had their laptop open just behind them on the desk. On the laptop [...]

You may recall the story this past August of a young Austrian woman, Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive in a basement for over eight years. Thanks to Canuckflack I found this article from Der Spiegel detailing the public relations and media planning which her advisors did for her in the days and weeks following [...]

I had a client deliver a below-average TV interview the other day and a lot of it was because she lacked energy. I asked her later whether she didn’t get enough sleep or if she had something on her mind – turns out she was suffering from what I call “green room fatigue”. A green [...]

In June 2004, Irish journalist Carole Coleman did a now-famous interview with George Bush (full transcript here) in which she pushed the US President about the war in Iraq in a way that few had done before that time. She subsequently wrote a book that takes off from that interview – Alleluia America: An Irish [...]

Sometimes there’s good reason to get up and leave an interview. Here’s a detailed account by John Davison, editor for the gaming blog 1UP, about his appearance in 2005 on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. Davison claims he was badly misled by the show’s director about the topics to be covered and that [...]

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 [...]

I didn’t watch any of the TV series Rock Star: Supernova – no interest to me, musically – but I’ve finally had some time to watch part of Week 8. Why take the time, you ask? Because that was “media interview week” on the show. Naturally, a show that aims to manufacture rock stars on [...]

Rest assured, this Katie Couric post is not about her legs, her hair or her clothes – it’s about her September 6 interview with George Bush. Someone at CBS decided that doing part of the interview during a stroll down the halls of the White House would be a good thing. I thought it came [...]