I reappear after weeks of running around the planet from one place to the next.

We are putting together a bid for Media Skills training for senior international officials. An interesting issue in all media training is how best to understand/practise the many different sorts of interview that you can encounter. These include:

  • TV studio interview with presenter present
  • Straight to camera (interviewer out of eyeshot or elsewhere) – unusually difficult
  • ‘Doorstep’: when a journalist plus camera/mic suddenly appears and asks you a question
  • Short statement (as if at press conference) followed by interview
  • Interview standing or sitting
  • Interviewer has poor grasp of language/issues/facts
  • Radio interview (sound only recorded)

Let’s look at these in turn.

TV/Radio studio interview, interviewer present

Fairly straightforward, in that a sense of ‘conversation’ is natural in the situation. The skill lies in saying something direct and clear and positive-sounding, then not rambling on about it. And keeping good eye-contact with the interviewer. The interviewer probably is not listening attentively to what you say (most of the time), with his/her ear on the instructions for the next slot.

Straight to camera, no interviewer visible

My first CNN interview was done this way. I was perched on a Bosnian mountainside next to the late Dick Holbrooke answering questions beamed to my ear from the CNN HQ in the USA. I had to look unwaveringly straight at the camera – there was no image of the distant interviewer. This is unnatural and awkward, especially if you have to sustain it for several minutes at a time. The cameraman behind the camera had to gesticulate to me to keep my eyes up and look straight ahead.

Here is a super example of my new hero Carly Fiorina whacking a top US news anchor. You can’t tell from this clip whether she can see his face in a screen as well as hearing his voice. No matter. He is trying to box her in by saying that she went too far in “calling Hillary Clinton a liar”. Watch how she pushes back. Superb technique: confident, precise, authoritative.

Doorstep

Tricky. You may have been taken by surprise by the journalist appearing or by the question put, or both. The context is informal if not improvised, and typically outside. Again, keep it simple. Don’t look/sound surprised or caught off balance. If you don’t know the answer, don’t flannel. Say that you’ll check as you want to be 100% accurate and let the interviewer know. Ooze authority with a businesslike mien.

Short statement (as if at press conference) followed by interview

Here you get the chance to set the scene and define the conversation/agenda in a more or less formal way before the interview starts. This ought to be advantage, as long as you do it confidently and clearly. It can be good to keep back a key part of what you want to say for the interview, but then make sure that you use it even if you are not directly answering the question. When preparing your statement, think about the idea media headline you might win from it: British Envoy Praises ‘Heroic’ Rescue Effort; Conditions for Refugees ‘Appalling and Disgraceful’, says Envoy. Note that the sort of word likely to catch a headline has unusual emotional content or otherwise stands out. Boris Johnson is a master of the form.

Standing or Sitting

Worth practising both. The psychological ‘tone’ of the discussion is very different. Likewise an interview on a breakfast TV studio sofa is very different from something more ‘serious’ when you are confronting the interviewer across a table in a policy discussion. The audiences are quite different. Make sure that your tone matches the occasion. People ‘hear’ your tone and mood as much as they hear anything you actually say.

Interviewer gets things wrong

This happens quite often. You are the expert. The interviewer is not, and is operating from questions served up by a hapless researcher. Back in 2010 I was live on CNN talking about the catastrophic Smolensk plane crash that killed Poland’s President Kaczynski and many other top Poles. I made the mistake of bring too clever and trying to explain that two Polish presidents had died that day: President Kaczynski and former President-in-exile (from the communist period) Ryszard Kaczorowski. The interviewer, unfamiliar with the history of Poland’s former presidents-in-exile, asked an ostensibly not stupid question: did not the presence on the plane of one of Kaczynski’s political rivals go to show his magnanimity? I then had to try to say in just a few words that these two of course had not been rivals and that both were on their way to the Katyn site. Not too bad on the day, but when the interview is all about being informative and (in this case) solemn, you don’t want to say anything dismissive of the interviewer or suggest that they haven’t a clue, however clueless s/he might be.

Another version of this one comes when the interviewer starts by innocently misrepresenting your actual opinion, on an issue where subtle differences if view matter. Back in 2009 I gave a live interview to Sky on the Nightjack case, a policeman who had blogged under a pseudonym but then been outed. My view was that it is OK to blog ‘secretly’, but not OK to complain or threaten legal action if someone finds out who you are. It’s like ranting at Hyde Park Corner in a mask, then being annoyed when someone follows you round the corner and recognises you when you take the mask off. Makes no sense.

Anyway, the interviewer led with a misrepresentation of my view: So, you think that anyone blogging under a pseudonym should be outed, then? Faced with such an unexpected and wildly incorrect start ,you have a micro-second to work out how best to reply accurately while steering the discussion on to solid ground. The worst possible response is to look disconcerted, or start bickering with the interviewer: you come across definitively as a loser, while the interviewer is familiar to viewers/listeners, and always has the last word.

Radio interview

Different from TV, as everything you want to convey has to be done by voice. You have no gestures or body language to help you (or hinder you). Practice makes perfect. As before, the discipline lies in not going on too long. Work out in advance which two or three core points you want to convey: anything more than that is probably too many. Then convey them. Then stop.

* * * * *

Moral? Hire me to explain all this in detail. Lots more vivid if not grim examples to choose from. NB not to fidget or tap your fingers nervously or scratch your nose or do something odd when on TV – all the TV audience notices is that.

It’s basically simple.

Less is more.