Has anyone here ever been interviewed by the press? How was the experience? Did the interviewer ask good questions? Or did you have to suplly a lot of information sort of ad-lib without questions?
Yes. This will vary depending on what the subject is and who the reporter is reporting for. I have been interviewed by local papers many times as I am on the Town Council. The interviews are usually short, and sometimes depending on the reporter the questions are very pointed and well thought out. All in all, nothing to worry about. If you are talking on something you have a good grasp on, there should be no worries. The worry comes in if you are infront of a live TV feed talking to a reporter. However, unless that is the media you are talking about, I wouldn’t worry about it.
I’ve been interviewed for a feature article in the newspaper about the charity I run. The interview was conducted over the phone, and he asked a lot of good questions. Many of the questions and answers were not touched on in the actual article though. I did have plenty of scope to ad lib and at least express the points I wanted to get in. After that it was up to him to use it or not. I was, however, **very, very conscious ** of what I was saying and how it might be skewed or “spun” to support a particular agenda (not mine!!) or simply misuderstood by the reader I was hoping to attract to the charity. Anything is open to misinterpretation at any time. If it were anything even remotely political in nature, I would be doubly cautious.
That first anthrax letter was sent to the building across the street from were I was working at the time. There was media circus all around the area, and me and my coworkers would walk through the media folks to eat lunch at Taco Bell frequently, and many of us were interviewed. A Wall Street Journal reporter asked me some questions, but I only recall one; was I scared to be working so close to where the anthrax was mailed, which killed one person? I was not. :dubious:
I have no idea whatsoever why that smiley is there, I did not mean to put it there.
Yes, by the local press in the 1980s, and it’s an experience that soured me for life. I may have been idiotically naive but I trusted the reporter when she assured me part of the interview would be off the record, strictly for her understanding and not to be used in the article.
Need I add that she printed every word, landing me in big, big trouble. I often ask myself, if she hadn’t been so damned cute would I have opened up quite so much? The answer is no.
A valuable lesson in life, although I wish it hadn’t been quite so costly.
Probably better suited to IMHO.
samclem GQ Moderator
Yes a couple of time and I stopped doing it. My cases were all on technical matters and I finally firgured it out. The reporter is first and last a writer and wants a good story. So in my case they always came with a story outline in mind, asked questions predicated on that story outline, and wrote the story according to their outline almost independent of what I said.
Yes…four times. The first time, I was actually interviewing someone else for a school project, and the paper was covering the school project. I don’t remember much about it, except for the fact that my picture really sucked. This was my freshman year of high school.
Two of the times (the 2nd and the 4th), I was being interviewed just as me; once for a Young Artists feature, and once because I’d won a writing prize. Both those times were pretty cool. I was kind of embarassed, though…I mean, how the hell do you answer some of these things when you know the entire damn town is going to read it? The first time, I admitted to writing during my A.P. Chemistry and A.P. Calculus classes, and my teachers read the article. My Chem teacher didn’t care much, but my Calc teacher gave me grief. The second time, I was described as having “an eager smile.” Well, yeah; when I’m nervous, I grin! I also tend to say weird things, and those things ended up as quotes. My nun/writing analogy Of Incredible Stupidity is preserved for all time. Joy. Both those times, they took my picture, too; I thought I looked like a terrible dork in both of them.
The other time, four students from our school won writing awards. The interviewer didn’t talk to me much; Maggie and Laura and Brian were all more talkative than me, and much better at not looking stupid. The picture turned out REALLY nice, though; I thought I looked half-decent, for once.
Twice, both very brief. The first time was at a summer solstice celebration (Ivan Kupalo - it’s an obvious pagan leftover involving the burning of straw effigies to determine how the harvest will be) in a small town a couple of hours from Novosibirsk, Russia, by a local TV station who had discovered there were a bunch of Americans running around and got curious.
The second was on 9/11, by the Chicago Sun-times, as I waited several hours in line to give blood. They printed only a sentence or two, but at least my boss believed why I took the next 2 days off sick. (Blood donation really doesn’t agree with me, but it had been so long that I’d forgotten why I don’t do it.)
Yup, more than once in 2000. Non-profits get press when there’s a slow news day, so a few of the NH papers did articles about the programs NH Reads (AmeriCorps*VISTA) did with WIC and preschool literacy. It wasn’t terribly exciting.
I used to be interviewed all the time in college. I was the Official Campus Homosexual[sup]TM[/sup] so any time anything of interest to the gay community hit the news I’d get a call. Eventually I became the Official Homosexual of Central Illinois[sup]TM[/sup] so I’d get calls from TV stations 50 miles away to do interviews. It was fun, but I always went into it with the awareness of the Awesome Responsibility Of Speaking For My People. I sometimes wonder who took over my official roles.
Living in Riyadh I occasionally do interviews (by phone) with the AP guy. It always scares me, thinking what he might print. After all, terrorists can read newspapers as well as anyone. To be fair to the guy, he always calls back before he sends the story and (so far) hasn’t printed anything likely to cause either the royals or the AQ types to swear vengeance against me.
Regards
Testy
Yes, on several occasions.
At least some of the time, the reporter seemed to be looking for a quotable sound bite that would illustrate the point they had already decided to make in the article they were already writing in their heads if not already in rough draft form on their hard drive. In those cases, it is hard not to feel that you aren’t being heard at all, and that you’re just being used.
On other occasions, the reporters really seem to be out there with a “get to the bottom of this and find things out” attitude, and they are more willing to let the conversation go in a direction other than what they anticipated. (Doesn’t mean the editor will, of course)
I have been interviewed on a few occasions, most of which were direct results from my deployment to Iraq. I was interviewed while deployed by a writer for a London newspaper; however, I forget the name of the newspaper. Upon my return from Iraq, I was interviewed a few times by various national and local newspapers, as I was on the first flight returning 101st ABN Div (AASLT) soldiers.
My most memorable interview was by the local Fox News station in Indianapolis. This interview followed the commission of our senior prank. They blacked out my picture and disguised my voice and everything. Pretty interesting, I still have it on tape.
I have one time, when I was walking across the UGA campus and a reporter from one of the Atlanta TV stations was stopping students to ask their opinion on a news story. Apparently, someone had “discovered” that a couple of female students were working as prostitutes to help pay for their school. When the reporter asked, I said that I hadn’t heard about the story but that it didn’t particularly surprise me; college students are always broke and even going to a relatively inexpensive public university like UGA was still pretty expensive. I could see students doing just about anything out of desperation.
I heard later that my interview was broadcast as part of the story, but I didn’t see it myself. I also heard that they’d misspelled my name, even though I made sure to tell the reporter twice before I left.
Yes, at least three times, if you count the time with ABC News. (There might be another time or two that I can’t recall.)
The first time was when I was waiting in line for—I don’t know which movie it was—one of the Star Wars movies? It was at the Cinerama Dome theatre in Hollywood, anyway, and we’d been there for a few hours. Anyway, this guy (I think he must have been from The LA Times) was wandering through the line of geeks and asking us questions about why we were there. He was polite enough.
A week or so later my aunt told me that she had read an article in the paper about these freaks who were wasting their time waiting a really long time in line for a stupid movie. “I want to read about these morons,” she thought. And then my name popped out of the text! She was so chagrined!
Then, about the same time (give or take a year), waiting in line for another movie at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. An ABC reporter (I think it was ABC) whose name is on the tip of my tongue (I think he worked for Nightline and his name was Jud? He died a few years back), anyway, he wanted to ask us why we were waiting so long in line. He got a friend of mine and me together and said, “Let’s pretend that you two are friends” (not knowing that we were actually friends) and then proceeded to ask us why we were so devoted to this film that we would wait in line for it (It was either a Speilberg or Lucas film). I tried my best to sound semi-intelligent, saying that I admired the director’s work. But of course I was babbling. And of course they didn’t use the footage they’d shot of me or my friend.
The third time was another interview with The LA Times, this time for a group art show. It was a pretty big deal. All of my fellow artists were nervous. One girl wanted to throw up, she was so scared. I was nervous, but not so much. I remember that this interviewer could not fathom that I didn’t use photo references for my plates (my contribution to the show was painted ceramic plates with portraits of cheesy TV-western type cowboys and indians). She kept on asking, “Who are these people? What photograhs did you use?” And I kept on having to repeat, "I just made them up out of my head." But she couldn’t quite comprehend that, and so kept on asking me who they were. They were nobody. Just made-up people. I guess she never met an artist who could just draw stuff out of their head, which seemed really odd to me.
The article in The LA Times was quite a nice little feature and everyone in the show was very proud of it. I also got my picture in The Glendale News Press from that same show, but no one interviewed me for that.
It felt as though CBC Radio was stalking me for two weeks last year. The first interview was at the opening for this local farmer’s art exhibit - a series of abstract sculptures made out of his cattle’s saltlicks (!). The best questions were whether I wanted to lick them myself (I thought she was joking, but later on I saw a fifty-year-old woman bending down and licking one of them) and whether I found them sexually arousing. Apparently I was on the local affiliate the next morning.
The second interview was maybe three days later. Our campus’s students’ union had sponsored a series of posters with the phrase “Don’t Be a Gordon” on them - this was shortly after B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell was arrested for drunk driving. The interviewer probably thought, okay, I might as well go to the campus pub and interview some drinkers about their opinion. So she asked me, who was three-quarters soused, whether I thought using Campbell’s name was a legitimate thing to do. I have no idea what I said, but according to another friend, I was again on the radio next day, sounding more intelligent and verbose (I apparently use ten-dollar words when I drink) than usual.
Now that I’m in j-school and on the other side of the microphone, I’m finding that asking the right question to get that super quote isn’t as easy as it seems.
I’ve been interviewed several times by our local excuse for a paper. All have been related to the bar industry in one way or another. Once, it was about a failed attempt to ban smoking in bar’s with in city limits. He took all I had to say out of context. To his credit, he still got my point across, but I ended up sounding like a pud.
Another time a reporter was writing our local music scene. I manage a bar that does a lot of live local music. But, all things music have been my assisstants responsibility ever since I took over. He knows the bands, he knows the musicians, he has a much better ear for what is good music and what is noise, plus, he enjoys it. I told the reporter several times “You really should talk to Scott,” and answered questions with “I don’t know, but Scott would, you can reach him at 123-4567” etc. Alas, he would not talk to Scott. So, I answered his questions as best as I could, and he had very little of substance to use in his article. Oh well, it’s still free advertising 
.
Most recently, NMSU was proposing putting a bar on the college campus and a reporter wanted to know how I thought it might effect our business. He was the 1st reporter that did not mis-quote me, take my words out of context or blatantly put words in my mouth. He did, however, spell my name wrong.
They’ve all been friendly enough. I haven’t had a serious problem so far.
~S
He was writing about our local music scene. :smack: