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Handling interviews

Everyone gets nervous about doing a media interview. Usually it's not as scary as it seems (unless you have to face Jeremy Paxman!) In fact an interview is a great opportunity for you to inspire people to get involved with your charity. There are some basic interview rules which will help you get your campaign message across to listeners, viewers and readers.  

Top tips for radio and TV interviews

  • Listen to the programme or radio show you are going to take part in and think about what speakers you found most interesting and why.
  • Find out roughly how long you will be on for and who will be interviewing you.
  • Work out what you really want to get across.  No more than two messages per interview.
  • Don't write notes or a script to use during the interview.  Notes are fine as preparation but if you try to read them during an interview you will lose all spontaneity.
  • Try to "paint pictures" and/or tell stories to illustrate your key points.  Listeners find it very hard to remember statistics or generalisations but they do remember human stories and things they can visualise.
  • Try to temper your pace and tone to that of the programme.  A news programme will want a pithy, short sentence or two, a "soundbite", but many radio programmes are quite relaxed.  They want an informal chat and, as long as your answers are interesting, they can be quite long.  
  • Try to get in a mention of your charity, but don't keep mentioning it every other sentence.  It sounds “pluggy”.
  • Make sure the presenter, producer and web producer have the correct details for your charity, its website and its phone number.
  • Get feedback from the producer and/or presenter after the interview.  Their observations will help you do it better next time.
  • Get someone from your office to record the interview.  More on this in the section, Evaluating media work.

The Talk Consultancy is one of many companies who offer voice training for TV and radio appearances. A half day of training, on a one-to-one basis, costs approx. £120).

Listen to this Metropolitan Police Special Constable on Radio 4's Today programme.

Newspapers and magazines

  • Find out who's interviewing you and do your research. Look at examples of the journalist's previous work. Find out about the magazine/ paper your interview will appear in. Work out what kind of tone the article is likely to have. 
  • Be brief and concise. A print journalist will want lots of short, punchy quotes from you.
  • Be prepared with one or two key messages you want to get across.
  • Be clear if you're telling them something "off the record" (i.e. you don't wish to be quoted in print). However as a rule, try and avoid telling a journalist anything you don't want used in an article.  
  • Ask if they'll read the final article back to you, so you can make sure that the facts are right and you haven't been misquoted. Not all journalists will do this because of time constraints. There are also no guarantees that they'll make any changes you ask for.  Have a look at The Guardian's Editorial Code. They, like most newspapers, won't allow anyone copy approval.
  • Illustrate all the key points you make in your interview with lots of real life anecdotes.
  • If you don't know the answer to a question, tell the journalist you'll need to call them back. It's fine if you don't have precise figures or statistics to hand at that moment.
  • Ask the journalist at the end of the interview if they got the quotes they needed from you.  
  • The journalist may well ask for a photo to run alongside the interview. If possible avoid giving them a dull head shot. Instead why not give a photo of you surrounded by volunteers or an action shot of you at work.
  • Follow up the interview with an email to the journalist. Ask them to include in the final article your charity's website and a phone number for their readers to call for more information. 

 

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