Conducting a Good Television Interview

Conducting a Good Television Interview Conducting a Good Television Interview A TV interview can be as simple as asking questions of people on the street, or it can be as involved as a one-on-one, sit-down discussion with the president. Getting good answers in a TV interview can make a news story come to life and build your reputation as a probing journalist. Build your skills so that you can lead the people you interview into giving you the information you want with simple TV interview tips every news media professional can use. Decide What You Want From a TV Interview Sometimes, all you want from an interview are some facts. If youre talking to the fire chief on the scene of a huge fire, you want to know the typical who, what, when, where, why and how. As long as you get answers to these basic questions, your needs are satisfied. But thats not the kind of TV interview that can help you win media awards or help you build a job-winning resume tape or DVD. You need to demonstrate that your skills go beyond asking simple questions. If you are interviewing a man whose wife was killed in a tornado, you want to prepare your questioning to draw out as much emotion as possible. Instead of asking something like, What time did the tornado hit?, youll get more by asking, What will your life be like without your wife by your side? Notice thats an open-ended question that will give you a meatier answer than something like, Are you sad your wife is gone? which could only produce a simple, Yes. For investigative work, you may need to ask preliminary questions to get your subject to relax before you hit her with the question you really want to ask. Its tough to start an interview with a highly-charged question such as, Do you feel your boss sexually harassed you? unless the person has already filed a lawsuit. Learn Something About the Topic of the TV Interview If youre assigned to cover the Libertarian Partys presidential candidate, asking the candidate Whats the Libertarian Party? is a giveaway that you didnt come to the interview prepared. If you find yourself in that situation, its better to camouflage your lack of knowledge by asking, For people who dont understand what the Libertarian Party is all about, how would you put it into words? Better still is to know that answer before the interview so that you can ask smarter questions. The goal is to find out answers to questions that viewers would want to know. Some interviewers go overboard to ask the most complicated, technical question they can find to demonstrate their own personal grasp of a subject. While that may inflate their ego, its wasted effort if the answer doesnt interest the people watching the news report. Listen Closely During the TV Interview Amazingly, this is one of the most common mistakes interviewers make. They are so wrapped up in planning their next question that its obvious that theyre not even listening to the conversation. Heres an example of that: The mayor says, I have failed my city and have decided that I must resign from office. I apologize for my poor performance in office and ask all residents to forgive me. The interviewer: So whens the next city council meeting? An interview is a conversation; you just happen to have a microphone, camera, and notepad. Concentrating too much on the mechanics will prevent you from getting the most out of the discussion. One aspect of listening is to not immediately jump in with your next question the moment the person stops talking. If you wait for a second or two, while maintaining eye contact, often the person will keep talking. That is useful if you are asking a question that is difficult to answer. The person will sense that the pause means youre not satisfied with what youve heard and are waiting for more. If you seek to get the person to admit to something, that pause can be the trick that throws the person off-balance enough to get him to say what you want. Ask Follow-up Questions in the TV Interview If youre listening during the interview and are not content with the answers youre getting, ask follow-up questions to get the information you want. Otherwise, youll return to the newsroom and discover that while you recorded a ten-minute interview with your U.S. senator, you didnt get any information. Politicians are masters of what some call the non-answer answer. You ask, Will you support raising taxes? and the answer you get is that the economy is bad, people dont like paying taxes, yet thats the money required to build schools and roads. You need to follow that idle chatter with, But are you voting for a tax increase? to let the senator know that you expect a direct answer and will keep asking until you get it. Asking follow-up questions requires not just listening, but flexibility. You may have your list of ten questions on your notepad, but if the conversation veers into an unplanned direction, you need to have something to ask. While planning is important, so is reacting to what you are hearing. Sometimes follow-up questions have to challenge someones answer. Other times, you may find follow-ups help you better understand a complicated answer. If youre not sure what someone means, its better to say, Explain it to me, than it is to get back to the newsroom and realize you cant write your story because you didnt understand what the person was talking about. End the TV Interview by Allowing the Person to Speak Freely Another useful technique when wrapping up an interview is to ask, Is there anything else youd like to say? Sometimes, youve simply forgotten to ask the most basic question. This is the persons opportunity to answer it or say something else of value. A person who might have been afraid of being interviewed and gave you nothing but timid answers could use this time to open up. Id just like to add that if it werent for the firefighters who saved my life, I wouldnt be here. Ill be forever grateful for their bravery, is a comment that could go into your story even though you didnt ask for it directly. Barbara Walters and Larry King are two people who made careers of mastering the TV interview. While you may be interested in other aspects of television that just conducting interviews, sharpening your skills will set you apart from the masses in the industry.