The Pro on the Go Season 4 Episode 8 (audio) Interviewing to Get Your Guests Talking with Janice Neil

 

A podcast with an interview format lives and dies by the strength of the interviewer. While there’s plenty of advice urging hosts to ‘just have a natural conversation’ with the guest, the interviewer is responsible for guiding the conversation. Without that, the podcast host and guests may just blather. How can hosts learn to ask questions to get their guests to reveal who they are, how they think, and share information that hasn’t been revealed on other shows.

While there are no hard and fast rules in an interview, one almost-forgotten interviewing guru has created a set of principles for effective interviewing, that are deceptively simple. John Sawatsky was one of Canada’s best investigative reporters. He approached interviewing with the rigour of a science, and so became a trainer for journalists around the world for three decades. In this presentation, I’ll lead participants through Sawatsky’s method to demonstrate how you can get the interviewee to do most of the talking, reveal who they really are and what they really think.

Janice Neil is a journalism professor at TMU who teaches podcasting and leads workshops on interviewing.

Key Take Aways

• Mistakes interviewers make in conducting interviews.
• How to develop interview questions to elicit powerful answers
• Seven examples of poor interview practices
• How to structure questions to develop narrative arcs
• Have fun listening to engaging interviews