Hostile Interviewing (and Lessons from Sarah Lacy)

In my Twitter Poll about interview fears several people clicked “other”. For some reason the reasons given are not registered but Peter was kind enough to add a comment to explain his reason for clicking this option.

He wrote: ‘I said; “The interviewer being hostile” Doesn’t even have to be aggressive (or satirical like Terry Wogan and David Ike, or Clive Anderson and the BeeGees). Disasters like Mark (Facebook) Zuckerberg being interviewed by that quack reporter women (Sa rah La cy) at the SXSW Keynote. It even made it to YouTube. And NEITHER of them came out particularly well. You can argue that a good interviewer will delve…’

Again, I will cover what to do if you find yourself being interviewed by a hostile/aggressive interviewer in another post. But I wanted to use this point to finish off the series of posts on you as the interviewer.

If you are interviewing someone for your niche or business you have to ask yourself what you would gain by being a hostile interviewer? Probably nothing except to scare off your interviewee and any other future subjects, as well as lose the opportunity to get some great material because your subject will clam up.

You are not Larry King or even Michael Parkinson. Both have developed a style that digs deeper in interviews, but then both interview subjects where it is essential to dig deeper in order to get to the crux of political issues or to find an angle with a well-known celebrity that others haven’t found to keep up their viewer ratings.

Nor are you a shock jock like Howard Stern whose interviews are designed to be irreverent and funny – more to glorify himself than those he is interviewing.

If you see yourself as a pretender to one of these crowns then you need to take broadcast and/or journalism training, hone your skills and get a career in this arena. 

As an interviewer for podcasts or product creation you will produce better and more valuable interviews by putting your subject at ease and asking pertinent (not impertinent) questions.

As for what you can learn from the Sarah Lacey incident…From all accounts she actually does have a laid-back, relaxed style of interviewing (and is more used to print media than broadcast). Part of the problem was that Mark Zuckerberg is quite a difficult person to interview. But as you can see that when asked the right questions he can talk in detail.

Sarah wasn’t attuned to her topic, her interviewee or the audience. Rather than asking Mark Zuckerberg questions that his audience wanted to hear, she talked about personal stories, flirted, came out with odd interjections and often made statements. Mark Zuckerberg even suggested she ask more questions. The audience became restless and revolted using Twitter. Sarah would have saved herself this embarrassment by doing her research and asking the audience (or potential audience) what they wanted to know. As it was, things went a lot better when she opened up questions to the floor and played a role as moderator.

First, you have to understand that this is not a common occurrence, even among professionals. Your first interview does not have to be conducted in front of a huge audience or with a difficult interviewee. Just make it two people talking about a mutual topic of interest. Do your homework. Ask your newsletter or blog readers what they would most like to know. Ask open-ended questions during the interview to push the interviewee into answering in sentences. If things become stilted or difficult, suggest a change of question or an end to the interview. Anything that is pre-recorded can be edited to remove the difficult moments or points where things dry up.

Again, the important thing is to relax and enjoy what you are doing and your interviewee will relax too.

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