Great interviews require preparation, clear structure, thoughtful questions, and active listening. They should have a clear focus and desired outcome. Interviews can take the form of accountability, information gathering, or discovery interviews, each with their own approaches and question styles. Preparing well and avoiding common pitfalls like closed or leading questions can help interviews succeed in their goals.

1. What your interviews need to be great
Your interviews need a few essential ingredients to make them great...
• Clear focus and a desired outcome
• Thorough preparation - including pre - interviewing if you can
• Strong, succinct introduction
• Logical structure
• Well-crafted questions
• Excellent listening and flexibility
• Impartiality
• Appropriate tone
• Appropriate length

2. How do the ABC's senior broadcasters approach their interviews?
Libby Price
Emma Ayres
Marius Benson
Steve Canane
(4:35mins)

3. Desired Outcome - get focused!
Before you start your interview, have a clear idea about what you want to get out of it.
Think of it as a road map. If you work out where you want to end up – a Desired
Outcome - you can clearly see how you can best get there.
One way of working out what your Desired Outcome is to come up with a 3 word
headline that sums up the angle you want to take.
For example, if you're doing a story on a cold snap and temperatures dropping well
below average temperatures your 3 word headline .. or angle....could be:
Frost kills crops Fruit vegies lost

4. What style of interview are you going to do?
Once you have a Desired Outcome, the next step is to work out what style of
interview you are going to do to reach your desired outcome:
Accountability, Information, and Discovery
Accountability – holding decision-makers, politicians, spokespeople accountable
Information – getting facts, figures, details
Discovery – learning more about someone or their story, getting to the heart of an
interview, finding out something different and unexpected about someone you
thought you knew.
Not all interviews fit neatly into these categories… they very often cross
categories. However, knowing the characteristics of the three styles of
interviews will help craft questions for your interviews.

5. How to approach an accountability interview
Accountability:
• Use of research to give questions weight
• Tightly focused and structured, pacey, maintains professional tone,
interviewee in control
• Questions restated if interviewee evading scrutiny
• Types of questions: strategic mix of closed and open
• Traps to avoid: losing control of interview, rising to personal attacks/abuse,
mirroring angry tone, opinion
Kelly Higgins-Devine from 612 ABC Brisbane interviews the National Director of Healthy
Weight at the Heart Foundation, Susan Anderson, about the Foundation’s ‘tick’.

6. How to approach an information interview:
Information:
• Generally short, focused, to the point
• Questions designed to elicit facts, figures, details
• Types of questions – open/closed/specifying (how many, when exactly,
where specifically)
AM’s Samantha Donavan interviews Associate Professor Frank Zumba from the
University of NSW.

7. How to approach a Discovery interview
Discovery:
• Trust established, interviewees encouraged to give insights into their
personalities, share experiences
• Listening attentively, allowing space, sitting with pauses and silences where
appropriate
• Relaxes, intimate, revealing. May be emotionally charged. Interviewer doesn’t
retreat into process questions
• Gentler pace, engaging with interviewee and their story, appropriate tone (not
gushy!), help the guest get to the heart of the story
• Research to inform questions without giving story away or telling it
• Traps to avoid – making the story about yourself, don’t avoid the emotion
• Types of questions - a lot of open questions

8. How to approach a Discovery interview continued
Discovery continued:
Jan Ruff-O’Herne was taken captive when the Japanese invaded Indonesia during
World War Two and like an estimated 200,000 women in the Asia-Pacific region, Jan
was forced into sexual slavery.
It was 50 years before she spoke about being a ‘Comfort Woman’ and was of the first to
do so.
She wrote about her experience ‘50 Years of Silence’ and this is a small part of the
interview she did at the time with ABC’s Phillip Satchell.

9. When interviews go bad
There are a range of reasons why interviews can go bad.
No focus. Bad prep. Poorly constructed questions. No research. Bad attitude (talent or
interviewer).
Check out some of these interviews. What could the interviewers have done differently
to make their interview work?
GMA
Meg Ryan
Zane Lamprey
Billy Bob Thornton
Jake Lloyd

10. Don't let your interviews go bad
Interview Blockers - don't let your interview go bad.
There are a range of questions which you will have heard in the previous audio which
contributed to how bad they were.
Warning !
Asking these kinds of questions could undermine the
! effectiveness of your interviews:
CLOSED QUESTIONS when an open questions would have
been better !
DOUBLE, TRIPLE barrelled questions. They're confusing for
everyone.
BEST/WORST questions which limit the interviewees
response
EITHER/OR questions limit the interviewee's response to two
things
TELL ME ABOUT isn't a question, it's an instruction and can
lead to a long answer
REPEATING what the talent just said is just boring

11. Open v Closed Questions
Justine Kelly is a senior radio trainer and former reporter, producer and content director.
She talks here about when closed questions work and when open questions are better.

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14. How do the ABC's senior broadcasters approach their interviews?
Libby Price
Emma Ayres
Marius Benson
Steve Canane
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15. How do the ABC's senior broadcasters approach their interviews?
Libby Price
Emma Ayres
Marius Benson
Steve Canane
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16. How do the ABC's senior broadcasters approach their interviews?
Libby Price
Emma Ayres
Marius Benson
Steve Canane
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17. When interviews go bad
GMA
Meg Ryan
Zane Lamprey
Billy Bob Thornton
Jake Lloyd
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18. When interviews go bad
GMA
Meg Ryan
Zane Lamprey
Billy Bob Thornton
Jake Lloyd
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module content

19. When interviews go bad
GMA
Meg Ryan
Zane Lamprey
Billy Bob Thornton
Jake Lloyd
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20. When interviews go bad
GMA
Meg Ryan
Zane Lamprey
Billy Bob Thornton
Jake Lloyd
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module content