Broadcast Interview Tips

I’ve conducted hundreds of broadcast interviews for BBC News as a journalist, so I thought I would share some insights I’ve learned. These apply to the kind of interviews I do, which are pre-recorded, feature interviews (as opposed to live or hard news) in the business and technology space. However, many principles apply beyond that.?These is just my personal take and the insights will not work for everyone.

No notes - I think the best interviews are kept as natural as possible. There is nothing worse than breaking eye contact to scan your notes for the next question when someone is sharing their thoughts or indeed a personal story with you. It feels wrong. It must make the person feel like their ideas are just items on a shopping list to be ticked off. So I memorise my structure beforehand. I’d rather forget a question than break eye contact. (An excpetion is if there is a precise quote you want to refer to). I do keep notes nearby and might check them at the end, but I see it as a big negative if I ever need to consult them during the interview, which I rarely do.

Improvise - Another reason to have no set interview interview structure on paper is that if somebody says something interesting, you need to go with that and see where the moment takes you. A rigid structure stops you being open to that. You should be exhausted after an interview because you have listened so intently. The best moments in any interview are when you become the first audience, you are hanging on their words, wondering what they will say next because you are genuniely intrigued.

Into the unknown - Ask questions to which you do not know the answer, which come from a place of genuine curiousity. It’s the opposite of being a courtroom lawyer, who doesn't want surprises in front of the jury. They interrogate to get the performance of the answers they want, which they are expecting, to make their case. Some media interviews have been researched by people who have looked at previous things the person has said in interviews, and they've cherry picked the most interesting things they said before, and they want those points repeated. To a certain extent you have to cover old ground to tell the fundamentals of a person't story. But in a features journalism interview I think you want to stumble upon new, surprising things and break new ground. Take a new path to find out things the audience didn't know before. Hopefully you will find out things that hadn't occurred to the interviewee before too, in fact.

Do you have other tips? Maybe you've been on the other end of interviews and can offer insights...

Dougal