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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the dangers of doing phone interviews (or IM interviews) is that you’re free to do all sorts of other things at the same time, as blogger Rene Gutteridge discovered: …I realized not too long ago that I was getting to an almost frenzied state of multi-tasking. This occurred to me one day during [...]

What are people feeling and doing while being interviewed by phone? You can find postings like this one from director Arin Crumley that give you some perspective: CFUN Radio Interview – Arin CrumleyUploaded by Arincrumley Arin and co-director Susan Buice have a good little collection of videos of their phone interviews – it’s a great [...]

Another voice weighs in on the email interview debate: Being interviewed is usually a miserable experience. One can expect to be misquoted, one does not always have time to reflect on answers, and it can be very stressful. I try to give only email interviews now, after so many experiences with being misquoted – which [...]

One of the big buzz words these days on the internet is transparency – and the posting of interview transcripts is a commonly touted as a key to providing transparency. As I was reading Powells.com’s online interview with Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, his description of the origins of this venerable literary magazine struck a [...]