Back to real interviews at last

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The real interview – where questions and answers are present – is back. And what a relief.

For a decade or more, we have seen what once were interviews cut back to the one sentence news grab. It’s a format suited to a tight television or radio news program, but highly frustrating for newsmakers and for audiences who wanted more.

Of course print has been plugging away without questions since newspapers were invented, and nothing changes there unless papers and magazines start running more transcript interview coverage.

The change has come with a plethora of new programs – mostly on television, and mostly in the business news category. We see the question and the answer.

For the audience, this is much more satisfying that news grabs. It is satisfying in a number of ways. From the personal level, we see more reaction to a question, and the hesitation – both cut out in news coverage.

We can also note what is not said, and the logical sequence of what is offered. Is the interviewee substantiating or just making assertions?

One of the most common criticisms we hear from the ‘punters’ is about politicians not answering questions. This is valid, but previously it could only be adduced from something like a 7.30 Report Kerry O’Brien interview which included the questions. 

Now we will have many more interviews to give the average viewer a chance to make this judgement.

From the newsmaker’s point of view, a question-and-answer interview is chalk and cheese to news grabs.  Instead of sounding like a robot hammering away at your one or two quotable quotes, you can now develop an argument, and even make more than one point. 

You will also be able to address more than one of your stakeholder groupings.

In our Handling the Media Interview training, we will now turn more attention to the devices needed to prepare and deliver the Q&A interview.

Our trademark MBE (main point-because/reason-example) answering package will be even more useful.  The techniques which we have developed for keeping the upper hand in this type of interview will also be even more valuable.

As a postscript, we could ask whether the interviewers will receive more training for this format which is less familiar to them.

We have training programs in how to answer questions, especially how to analyse answers into the four ‘unsatisfactory’ categories. This analysis gives the interviewer the lead on what type of question to ask next.

We’ve taught this questioning technique to many people – investigators, overseas TV personalities, HR people, engineers, lawyers – but never an Australian journalist.

Maybe this explains the thinness of talent among our media interviewers in Australia.

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