The Media Interview

As I started to watch yesterday’s much talked about interview with Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters on CBC Radio out of Toronto, I thought we were in for another Sigur Ros or Joaquin Phoenix stunt, when the interviewee simply clams up. Then, as host Jian Ghomeshi asked about Billy Bob’s musical influences growing up, [...]

Being the first standing US president to appear on a TV talk show has its rewards and its dangers.  The danger came in the form of an inappropriate remark about the Special Oympics which drew immediate criticism.  The reward came in the form of a lengthy, often substantive interview worthy of the Newshour watched by [...]

The television industry has, over the years, developed an intricate network of satellite feeds and other means to create what we’ve taken for granted over the last decade or so: the satellite interview or discussion. Now Skype and other internet video technologies are making that intricate network almost obsolete, overnight. Take a look at this [...]

Missed this during CNN’s election coverage, but on November 4 they pulled off a television first – they brought someone into studio via hologram. Correspondent Jessica Yellin was in Chicago, but she was “beamed” into the Washington studio with Wolf Blitzer. As a tip of the hat to Star Trek (and good old fashioned show [...]

If you have to cough or sneeze in the middle of an answer, or a loud truck rolls by in mid-sentence, it’s important that you be able to start again so that they have a complete sentence to edit. You also need to make it sound like you’re doing it for the first time. Pittsburgh [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 in [...]

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 [...]