June 15, 2000
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On the surface, an interview resembles an everyday conversation, if a slightly stilted one. But keep in mind that it's a mode of interaction with a lot of implicit expectations of what all the parties are going to get out of it. As the subject, you're trying to get your point-of-view clearly communicated in a public forum. As the interviewer, the reporter is trying to get whatever facts, opinions, and quotes e'll need to fill holes in eir story. It's okay to treat it like a transaction, and it can vary from a conversation in a few ways.
I don't know about anybody else, but when I was growing up, hanging out with my mostly geeky friends, we talked really fast. We took a lot of pride in being smart, and we loved spitting out words as fast as possible, trying to be the first to say something really insightful or funny.
You shouldn't think of interviews this way. In a day-to-day conversation, you try to avoid long pauses, because they're socially uncomfortable, and you can also run the risk of losing the attention of the person you're talking to. This isn't the case when you're dealing with the media. First, you can't lose their attention, because it's their job to listen to you for the duration of the interview. Second, any pause you make probably won't be noted in the resulting piece.
(Some might think that an unsympathetic TV reporter will use a pause to make you look like you've been cornered by a tough question, but my impression is that: 1. TV news stories are usually far too limited in length to allow for dramatic pauses, and 2. If a TV reporter wants to make you look bad, e works in a field with so little qualms about manipulating the story that your pause will be the least of your problems.)
So you should let yourself take healthy pauses. If you have to be silent for a couple of seconds so the sentence that comes out of your mouth is clearer and more succinct, it's worth it. The interviewer is paying attention to what happens when you open your mouth, not when you close it.
I can't tell you how many times I've done an interview and heard something that sounded, at the time, like the most profound thing I've ever heard in my life — then I transcribe the tape and realize that it's eight sentences end-to-end, and not a single sentence works without the other seven, and I end up summarizing the whole damn thing.
Remember that any quotes you get are going to be ripped out of context and slotted into a story, surrounded by expository text and other people's quotes. Try to make this process as easy as possible by providing clear sum-up sentences to longer things you may have said.
How is this different from a sound bite? Well, sound bites are a lot easier. The sum-up sentence takes a complex opinion and boils it down to its clearest form without sacrificing nuance. The sound bite takes a simple-minded opinion and makes it even simpler. Civic discourse would be in much better state if people used less sound bites: They're so common because most people in the political arena, besides being unscrupulous, aren't that smart.
Since the journalist will be asking all sorts of questions, and apparently leading the conversation, you may feel like being polite and going along. But if you feel like you have relevant opinions or anecdotes that you don't think will come up from the journalist's line of thinking, feel free to bring them up yourself. A professional journalist won't be upset if you do this, since nobody's perfect and there's a very good chance that your initiative will help that journalist write a better story. (An unprofessional journalist is not the kind of person you should be talking to at all.)
Say you're hanging out with a friend, and you couldn't remember the name of Veronica's bookish friend in Heathers. When you get home, you probably wouldn't go online first thing, look it up, and then call your friend, say "Her name was Betty Finn," and hang up.
But in interviews, that kind of behavior is normal and sensible. If you don't have something the reporter needs — and it could be as trivial as the exact date of your parents' wedding, or how many miles there are on your car — you should consider offering to look it up later, and letting em know.
Take the previously mentioned case of the webmaster who didn't know how many users his site had. Ideally, he would have had those numbers immediately on hand, but obviously they weren't that important to him. Failing that, the next best thing would've been to ask me what my deadline was, and, assuming he had a little time to write some script to process his logs, offer to e-mail me later with a number. Then, maybe two hours later, I'm working on my final copy, complete with a phrase that reads "XXXX people view his site in an average week", and I get an e-mail from him with an exact number. I plug it into the story and keep writing, simple as that.
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