Interview tips Archives - Page 2 of 2

B2B media, Interview tips, What journalists want

How not to annoy B2B journalists and get more press coverage

Back in my days as B2B journalist, I was once told by someone I was interviewing for a feature that I should be doing my bit to boost the market.

They wanted me to write a positive piece about their area of the market. It’s the sort of comment that would have me rolling my eyes.

Why? Because putting a positive spin on the market wasn’t my job as a B2B journalist. I’d be doing a disservice to the readers of the magazine if I didn’t set out what was happening in the market – good, bad or otherwise.

Misconceptions about a journalists roles are common and those sort of requests not unusual.

My response was always the same, I would politely talk about maintaining the integrity of the publication by presenting an accurate view of the market. And they would always agree that that was an important thing to do.

It didn’t always stop them trying the same tactic to steer the editorial in a direction favourable to them another time. Sadly.

Tiresome tactic

But this tactic never worked, it was tiresome and didn’t serve longer-term relationship building.

A B2B journalists job isn’t to do your marketing for you. A feature or news story isn’t an advertorial, it’s not a brochure.

What a journalist is trying to do is find out useful and interesting information for their readers.

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Interview tips, Training

How to rock Zoom and podcast media interviews

The pandemic has made video and audio interviews more commonplace.

Being confined to working from home has accelerated the use of video calls and opened up a new, easy and accepted way for the media and businesses to create video content.

Similarly, podcast interviews can be recorded online with participants sitting anywhere in the world.

Many of the UK’s biggest broadcasters have switched to online recording as safe way to produce content instead of in-person interviews.

Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s Ways To Change The World podcast (a favourite of mine) is just one example.

What all this means is the likelihood of being asked to do a video or audio interview is increasing.

But do you know the dos and don’ts so that you look and sound your best?

Here are a few key pointers:

Zoom video interviews

Camera position: Have your computer’s camera (or external camera) at eye level so you are looking directly at it, rather than down or up. (It’s generally a more flattering angle too.)

Interview tips, Training

‘Will a journalist correct my grammar in a quote?’

When I do my media training sessions a common question is about how the journalist will quote you.

There is a fear that what you say will appear verbatim regardless of repetition, verbal ticks such as using ‘like’ and slips in grammar.

What you have to remember is that very few of us speak with the sort of grammatical precision you’d see printed.

Live news presenters are perhaps the most polished but they are highly experienced and they still don’t always speak perfectly.

We all repeat ourselves, stutter and stumble over our words occasionally. We speak in incomplete sentences or miss words, say ‘um’.

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