Tricks of the Podcasting Masters

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Finding Guests

  • Prep Work for Live Interviews

  • Using Skype and Other VoIP Services

  • Double-Enders

  • Face-to-Face Interviews

  • Time-Shifted Interviews

  • Interview Flow

Respect the listener as much as you respect the person you're interviewing. Neither is an idiot.

Wichita Rutherford, 5 Minutes with Wichita

David Letterman, Oprah, Larry King, Barbra Walters, Johnny Carson.... The list goes on and on of famous people who became famous by interviewing other famous people. If we said you have 60 seconds to write down as many names as possible of different programs based primarily on conducting interviews, there is a good chance you would run out of time before you ran out of shows. By and large, people enjoy watching someone being interviewed if the interview is done well. So what does it take to make a good interview? As Wichita stated to start this chapter: R-E-S-P-E-C-T. If you respect the listener and the guest, both will enjoy the interview. In addition to respect, you also need to have fun with the interview, and you need to share that feeling of fun with the listeners and the guests. Wichita went on to say the following:

"The people who listen to my podcasts are very smart, and they have figured out there are several levels of humor going on in my interviews. For example, when I finish an interview, I ask the interviewee to read a couple of sentences from a physics book. I put that at the end of the next interview when the artist says, "Come back next week and hear Charlie Daniels say, 'As an object approaches the speed of light, the energy of motion is converted into mass.'" It sounds funny to hear somebody famous say something like that.

"These things sure don't sound very important one at a time once a week. But string them together, and I'm telling you how to build a particle accelerator. And out of the 200 to 300 emails I get every day at least one person every other week says "Oh yeah, the particle accelerator is coming along nicely." That's how I found out I have a pretty big cluster of subscribers over at MIT."

Note

To learn more about the 5 Minutes with Wichita podcast, see, "5 Minutes with Wichita," p. 64 (Chapter 3, "Podcast Genres").

Even if the interview is only a small part of your show, an interview done well can really improve the overall feel of your show. In this chapter, we go over those items that we feel will help improve your interviews.

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