The Media Interview

Love this observation from the Capital Cloak blog: Professional athletes and government intelligence officials have at least one shared characteristic: Both give a lot of media interviews, but despite an abundance of words spoken neither offers anything beyond tired clichés. I often wonder why journalists bother conducting such interviews. Rarely will a professional athlete state [...]

U.S. Senator Trent Lott gives a very clear example of the “Sorry, but the answer will have to wait until I make my point first” technique for handling live interviews: BLITZER: I know you have concerns about this troop increase going forward in Iraq. But I just want you to spell out what your concerns [...]

I’m not sure how straight many of the answers were 20 years ago – questions were just avoided with less pinache perhaps – but this journalist makes a good point about the effects of media training on political interviews: …twenty years ago you could interview people and ask them straight questions and have a reasonable [...]

I like reading media interview tips from interviewees – I hope people will do more – and here’s one from U.S. politician Kenn Gividen. My favourite tip: “use breath mints”. Sorry, didn’t mean to make it sound like it’s a trivial list – there are good points made – but the breath mints tip is [...]

Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner being interviewed as an avatar in Second Life. And here’s a follow-up posting about how the mainstream media reported this interview. An interview in this virtual world is essentially an Instant Messaging (IM) interview with animation, and I personally find the animation distracting – in large part because it’s crude [...]