NPR's Podcast Start Up Guide by Glen Weldon

Author:Glen Weldon [Weldon, Glen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Booking and Planning the Interview

If you’re satisfied with the preinterview and would like to set up the formal interview, let them know that you’d like to book an interview and, if they agree, move into planning-the-actual-interview mode.

Put the person at ease about the process. For starters, get their name right. Ask for pronunciation if you aren’t sure. Jot it down in a way that’ll help you remember. Ask for any professional title or other identifier they want used, as well as their preferred gender pronoun. This is part of accurate reporting and respecting your interviewee for their time and contribution.

If appropriate to your show, ask guests for a bio that you can draw on to introduce them; that way, you both know the information will be accurate. Also if appropriate, ask for info on where listeners can find their latest film, book, album, and the like.

Sometimes people get all tangled up about taping an interview and start sounding stilted and unnatural. Or they spout jargon (because they think they “should” or maybe it’s just how they talk). Your job: Angle them toward what would help your audience understand what they have to say. As All Things Considered editor Jessica Deahl writes: “I often tell prospective guests to imagine they’re explaining the subject at hand to a really smart high school student.”

If you book the interview, plan together where and how it’ll happen. Scope out the technical side: Could you both be in a studio (ideal, but rare)? Use a recording app? If a phoner, how good is the sound? If an internet platform, how’s their connection? If on location, talk about a recording space (see chapter 9). Make time to record active sound if needed, and kick around ideas—what sounds would be associated with this person’s world? Add them to your sound list.

Some podcasts pay interviewees for their time. It’s NPR policy not to pay those we interview for news or features—but on PCHH, for example, we do pay guests or “fourth chairs,” those we invite to the table to take advantage of their expertise. Generally (very generally) speaking, the difference is whether the person you’re interviewing is considered a source (no pay) or a contributor (small fee).

Try to get everything you need in that interview session. That way, the active and ambient sounds associated with that interviewee’s voice will be consistent in the final piece, creating an easier editing job for you and a more seamless listening experience for your audience. If you need more tape and can’t return to the location, make sure your script signposts to your audience that this professional fisherman you’d interviewed aboard his boat is now talking to you by phone—nary a splash to be heard: “We wondered.… So we called Joe Jenkins on one of his rare days off to find out.”

Allow more time than you think you’ll need. Sami Yenigun, supervising editor for All Things Considered, helped start the podcast What’s Good with Stretch & Bobbito as a producer. “For a half-hour show,” he says, “we might record a two-hour-long interview or an hour and a half, maybe.

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