Before I prepare interviews I also sit with a blank document
and think, what do I want to get from this? What questions do I want to know
about this topic that hasn’t already been reported?
Although having had a lot of practice interviewing talent it
was particularly daunting during this semester knowing that I would be graded
upon my interview questions during the PR news studio interview assessment, as
opposed to just the outcome like a written news or radio story.
Interview preparation is not just confined to writing up the
right questions; there are many other things that must be looked upon, the
website matador outlines the things to focus on when preparing for an interview
such as:
1. Location
2. Asking questions the
right questions
3. Demeanour
4. Interviewing the
right talent
1. Location
When choosing a location for the interview to take place, matador expresses
that you interview in a place that has some relevance to the subject of your
story, for example you wouldn’t interview the prime minister about carbon tax
and its effect on farmers in the middle of Luna Park.
The locations my partner and I chose for our interviews were
the office of the man we were interviewing at the department of tourism and our
other talent was interviewed in the city with the city landscape in the
background, both of these tied into the relevance about the Canberra centenary.
2. Asking the
right questions Always ask the six basic questions, Who, What, When,
Where and Why. Also another foolproof measure is to write twice as many
questions as you think you will need, I made the rookie error of not doing this
for my PR interview and ran out of questions within two minutes, because I took
my first PR interview as a template of how I believed the second one would go.
BIG MISTAKE!
An example of not asking the right questions is from the
novel “Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason” by Helen Fielding. Bridget Jones
interviews Colin Firth and asks him questions such as “what is your favourite
colour” and “would you leave your wife for me.” She asks these questions even
though the interview subject is about his new film.
3. Demeanour
It is important to strike a balance when doing interview between conversations
and getting the job done. The flow of questions should be natural and
conversational. I also found it easier heeding the advice of the lecture and
met up with my talent for the PR interview beforehand which made the interview
a lot smoother.
I felt we struck this
balance when interviewing for the News Package assignment by asking personally
directed questions to the talent such as “what are you are most excited about
for next year” Although perhaps we could have placed these questions at the beginning
of the interview so the interviewee was more at ease!
An excellent example of when this technique has been used is
the famous Frost and President Nixon interviews; because Frost worked on his
demeanour he was able to get what were once thought to be unattainable answers
about the Watergate scandal.
4. Interviewing
the right talent The most important aspect of preparation for an
interview is to do the research and make sure you are interviewing the right
talent for the story! The talent we interviewed had a direct involvement with
the centenary celebrations so we were quite lucky. We had no problems finding
people to interview about the centenary although, we really wanted to interview
someone participating in the human brochure campaign but this fell through
unfortunately, next time we will have to chase this lead earlier as we left it
quite late.
The website media helping media outlines some other key
preparations for interviews such as making sure the equipment works before
leaving the office, something so simple it may be overlooked but alas very
important we won’t always have the media team at university to ensure batteries
are charged and equipment is working.
More tips for
interview preparation can be found at the media helping media website:
And the Matador
network website:
http://matadornetwork.com/bnt/13-simple-journalist-techniques-for-effective-interviews/
No comments:
Post a Comment