[ MODULE 5 // INTERVIEWING ]

“Tell me more.” Listen closely to your favorite interviewers and you’ll hear some version of that request in their conversations, and often.

What we’re really getting at with that question is a bigger one: who are you? What makes you interesting? What stories do you have to tell that will make our world bigger, or that will bring clarity to an area of life that previously felt opaque?

Nate: In our Great Story module, we talked about the elements of a great story: conflict, character, setting, and resolution. In this week’s module we’re going to take a closer look at character. Because whether you’re interviewing your next door neighbor or the president of the United States, your ability to bring that person’s character to light will be the difference between rambling chitchat and perspective-shifting insights.

But first let’s start with the big question we’re always asking: why create? Or in this case: why interview?

Laura: Your answer to this question will shape the way you interview—and who you choose as guests. One of the exercises for this week is to create your own interviewing code of conduct. In this week’s materials for further reflection, we’ve provided a couple of examples of other creative codes to consider as you develop your own, including the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, and a pledge by an organization called Ethical Storytelling, whose founder Rachel Goble has spent much of her life working with vulnerable populations and sex trafficking survivors. 

The SPJ code of ethics includes the following four pillars: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. 

In the exercise for creating your own interviewing code of conduct, we’ve provided a list of questions to consider, and then 6 steps to help you establish your interviewing protocol.

Nate: So let’s start with the big picture of interviewing: when you conduct an interview, where is your primary allegiance or purpose?

Is your primary duty in that interview to the story you’re trying to tell? To the person you’re speaking with? To your artistic vision? To your listeners, or “the public?” To some notion of “the truth?”

Laura: You may feel a duty to all of these things, but identifying which of these elements is most important to you will provide a kind of ethical compass for you as you develop your own interviewing codes and systems.

I’ll give you an example of this. At Shelter in Place, our show is primarily focused on bringing people together and figuring out creative solutions to live better in a broken world. We’re more interested in uplifting people than exposing their mistakes. This is just as true when we’re interviewing people we agree with as with people whose politics or beliefs might diverge from ours significantly. 

This doesn’t just shape the way we do interviews, but who we choose to interview. I’ll give you an example of this. The week of the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, when we knew that some of our listeners would be voting for Biden, while others would be voting to reelect Trump, we intentionally featured guests with very different politics, who both had a perspective our listeners might not have considered, but that we hoped would give them more compassion for the people they disagreed with: Georgia Wright, whose podcast Inherited spotlights the youth climate activist movement, and the former Navy Seal Jimmy Graham, whose company Able Shepherd provides high level training to defend schools, churches, and other public places from active shooters. We saw in both their stories a sincere desire to act with integrity, and come up with creative solutions to heal their communities and our planet. We certainly could have spent those interviews highlighting all of the ways that Georgia and Jimmy would disagree with each other, but our interviewing code of conduct led us to questions that for us, were far more interesting. We found it inspiring and hopeful to realize that these two very different people were both after similar things but with very different methods. We wanted to celebrate the good that they were doing. 

By the same token, we would never pursue an interview with someone who seemed to be acting unethically, carelessly, or who was consciously exploiting others. We only interview people we can genuinely celebrate, or who have some expertise or insight that we think will make our listeners’ world better. There’s nothing wrong with journalism that exposes evil—our world needs it—but that isn’t what our show is after. 

So now that you’ve spent some time thinking about your interviewing code of conduct, let’s get more specific, to the steps of actually doing the interviewing and then turning those interviews into episodes. 

We’ve broken this process down into six steps. For each of those steps, you’ll find templates to use so you don’t have to start from scratch in building your own system, and real-life examples of how we’ve used these templates for episodes we’ve created. Whether it’s just a folder on your desktop or in an online project management tool, we encourage you to have a place where all of these templates live, so anytime you need them you can easily customize them to the situation at hand.

Nate: Step one: set up the interview. 

Before you reach out, ask yourself why you want to interview this person, and why you think they’re a good fit for your show. 

We don’t often think about asking for interviews as pitching ourselves, but that is essentially what we’re doing when we reach out to a potential guest. Obviously this pitch will look very different if the person you want to interview is your mom, vs. a celebrity who has never heard of you, but the goal is the same: make a clear, concise, and compelling case for saying yes to being a guest on your show.

We’ll talk a lot more about pitches in their various forms in future modules, but as a general rule, the best pitches are almost always brief, to the point, and include just one clear request. 

A good professional pitch is actually just like a good romantic pitch: they both should follow this simple three-part structure: “I see you, I love you, we belong together.” Again, “I see you; I love you; we belong together.”

So following that structure, your email to your potential guest should convey that you’re familiar with their work (“I see you”), why you want to talk to them (“I love you”), and why it makes sense for them to be on your show (“we belong together”)—but often the best way to convey these things is to say less, but say it well. 

Laura: You’ll see in the email template and examples included in this week’s module that we put something along the lines of “TIME SENSITIVE: podcast interview request” in the subject line, and the emails themselves are short and to the point. We include links to our podcast trailer and press kit, so our guests can get a sense of who we are, the work we do, and what we’re asking them for in a matter of minutes. 

Be prepared to follow up multiple times. Don’t take it personally if you have to try a few times to find someone who will respond to your request. People are busy and there are few in this world who manage to keep up with every single email that comes their way.

If you don’t hear back after reaching out a couple of times, see if there’s a way to connect to that person through someone else. If they are an author or public figure working in entertainment, they likely have an agent. Oftentimes you can figure out who that is by Googling the person’s name and the word “agent” or “publicist.” 

Nate: Step 2: Prepare your guest.

Once your guest has said yes to the interview, you’ll want to give them a slightly more detailed version of what to expect. 

At Shelter in Place, we send recording instructions, a release form for our guests to sign, and a participant information form that gathers things like their bio, preferred pronouns, headshot, social media handles, and anything else they want us to include in the show notes for their episode. You’ll find all of these in this week’s module, and we encourage you to use these templates and adjust them to fit the needs of your podcast.

Laura: Preparing your guest also means taking into consideration whether or not they’d like to know the questions you’ll be asking during the interview. Some podcasts send those questions up front, while others prefer to let the conversation be more spontaneous. We’ve done a bit of both.

If a guest requests to have the questions ahead of time, I’ll always send them, and I’ll always include a question at the end to give them a chance to talk about anything they’d like to share that we haven’t covered.

Preparing your guest also means thinking through technical considerations. Will the interview be in person, or remote? Is the guest a fellow podcaster who is likely to have a podcast mic? If your guest is has been interviewed on radio, they might own a lavalier mic that’s been sent to them for past interviews even if they’re not a podcaster themself. 

Be ready to walk them through the technical side of things if necessary, and let them know that you’ll spend the first few minutes of the interview doing a soundcheck and troubleshooting if it’s needed.

Have a plan for what you’ll do if your guest’s Internet drops out, or if their computer crashes, or they don’t own wired headphones or earbuds. Think through these questions and have a backup recording, and also a plan for a backup to your backup if it comes to that. 

Keep in mind too that even if your recording instructions are meticulous and thorough, not all of your guests will take the time to read them, even though you’ve requested it. Be ready for the worst case scenario so you can be calm, warm, and respectful of their time even if your best laid plans fail.

Nate: Step 3: Prepare yourself

Preparing yourself for the interview means thinking through what you need to be prepared for this conversation.
How much research do you need to do ahead of time? What questions will you ask? Will you stick to a specific list of questions, or let the conversation unfold in a way that might even surprise you?

Laura: When I was a news reporter for my university newspaper early in my career, I thought the only way to interview was to learn everything I could about a person before our conversation. If they’d written articles or books, I’d try to read all of them. Particularly if you’re interviewing someone who is a renowned expert, or who has published extensively on a topic you’re covering, it can be insulting to show up without first familiarizing yourself with their work. 

But there is also such a thing as over-preparing. Too much pre-interview prep can make a conversation feel stilted or canned, which is something Anna Sale and Jesse Thorn talk about in their conversation in The Turnaround, which you’ll find a link to in this week’s materials for further growth. Overpreparing can also make you too rigid in the questions you’re asking. 

So how much prep do you need going into an interview? It depends both on the kind of show you have, and your relationship with the person you’re interviewing. One of the templates you’ll see in this week’s module is a fact sheet, along with two examples of fact sheets we’ve put together for past episodes with Jemar Tisby and Sarah Chavez for our season 2 episodes Prophetic Imagination and A Good Death. These fact sheets include information I want to make sure I’m keeping top of mind when I’m talking with these people, but they’re not detailed life histories. Since both of the guests in these examples have podcasts of their own, I made sure to listen to their podcast trailers and at least a couple of episodes.

Regardless of whether or not I send my guest questions in advance, I do go into an interview with a list of questions. This includes questions that are specific to that person, as well as a short list of questions I always keep in my back pocket in case I need them, that I’ve found to consistently get interesting answers no matter who I’m talking to.

But I also give myself permission to go off-script or discard my list completely if I need to. Sometimes a conversation can go in a completely different direction than I anticipated—one that is actually more interesting than what I went in expecting. I love it when this happens, because it can shift the narrative arc of an episode to a place I never would have taken it on my own.

No matter who I’m talking to, I try to put them at ease both by asking questions that invite them to talk about something that makes them feel strong. I try to communicate that I’m there to highlight and celebrate the good things they’re doing, not to grill them. When they’re struggling to relax or they seem nervous, I try to find many different ways of saying “tell me more” until I find one that helps them to open up and feel more comfortable. 

It’s also helpful to remember that no matter who you’re talking to, your guest will be new to your listeners. Even if you find yourself in an interview where you realize too late you don’t know something you should, you can always frame your questions as something like, “for our listeners who aren’t familiar with your work, can you share a little bit about (fill in the blank)?” Even if you do know all about that person going into the interview, ask your questions this way can help you ensure that you don’t leave out important information that may be obvious to you, but that your listeners will want to know.

Nate: Cross-talk is worth bringing up on its own because eliminating it is a subtle but intentional move away from real-life conversations, especially in Western culture, where we often tend to start talking before the other person has stopped. Just as learning to ask interesting questions that will help your guest open up is a skill, so is learning to be quiet when they’re talking. This means finding ways to visually show them you’re listening without making sound, and also keeping your body still so the tape isn’t cluttered with sounds of you moving around or shuffling papers. 

If you’re in a remote interview, the simplest way to train yourself to do this is to mute your mic while the other person is talking. In-person interviews are trickier, because it’s easier for us to let our guard down when we’re in the same room with someone, and to forget that our verbal responses of “mm-hmmm” and “yeah, totally,” can make great tape feel cluttered and distracting. (Again, distractions = mental distance.)

Of course there are plenty of interview shows that are just verbatim  recordings of people talking over each other, and making the usual conversational interjections that we do often in real life. Sports halftime shows with multiple hosts are often packed with cross-talk. It’s up to you to decide if cross-talk fits your Great Sound ethos.

Part of our ethos in helping our guests to be the “best version” of themselves is eliminating crosstalk whenever possible. If our interviewee is worth listening to, they’re worth listening to without interruptions.  

Laura: Step 4: Follow up

After the interview, follow up with your guest. Thank them, and let them know when they can expect to hear from you again. If you don’t yet know your release date, communicate to your guest that your production schedule is still in flux. Set their expectations so they’re not surprised if a few months go by before they hear from you again. Let them know that you’ll reach out when you have a release date set. 

Decide whether or not you want to offer your guest the chance to hear the episode before it goes live, and then make sure you have the episode done by that earlier date if you’re committing to that.

This is also the time to follow up with the forms you sent them before the interview. I know many podcasters who won’t do an interview before they’ve gotten those forms back. 

We decided early on that the most important consideration for our episodes was that our guests felt celebrated and honored. We will never do “gotcha” interviews, and we do our best to be relentless in our fact-checking and are transparent in our show notes about where we’re getting our information. We also give our guests the right to request changes if there’s anything they hear in the episode that makes them uncomfortable. We go out of our way to make sure that guests feel honored both in the actual conversation, and in the episode that comes from it. Which brings us to the next step.

Nate: Step 5: Edit with kindness

Editing with kindness refers to what you do with the interview tape once you’ve got it. Your decisions here will depend both on your interview code of conduct and practical considerations like how much time you had and whether you’re working alone or on a team. 

Laura: At Shelter in Place, we have a specific list of edits we make to every interview—but all of them can be summed up this way: we do our best to make our guests sound like the best, most articulate version of themselves—and at the same time exactly like themselves.

Nate: This means preserving the natural tone and cadence of someone’s voice. You already know this on a gut level just from hearing other people talk, but when you look at the waveform of your interview tape, you’ll see that everyone’s individual sound waves look a little different; some people drag their words out or slur them together. Some people have tighter, more clipped beginnings and endings to their words. An important point in our interview ethos is to preserve unique personal speech patterns even as we’re making adjustments to make them sound like that best version of themselves. Even though we can observe patterns about how much space we leave between words or phrases, we’re not assigning pauses by any mathematical formula. We’re listening, sometimes to the same section several times, to find that sweet spot that feels natural and true to that person, but keeps the episode moving.

A helpful way to sum up approaching interview editing is to think about an audio editing triage list: what are the urgent things you always fix? What is the next category of things you like to fix? And then what’s the last group of things that you only do if you have time? 

Laura: The first thing we do with any tape is to upload it into Descript, generate a transcript, and with the click of a button remove all of the filler words, those “umms” and “uhhs” that we almost never need. 

We’ll get into visual editing deeper in an upcoming module, but I’ll mention it here since it’s the next step we make in audio editing. Before we ever put on headphones, we visually edit the waveform or transcript by cutting out anything that we know we won’t use. This includes those minutes at the beginning of the interview where we were doing a sound check, and also the time when we were asking questions and our guest was just sitting quietly or shifting in their seat. 

At some point we do put on headphones to listen, and tighten up long spaces, remove lip smacks and audible breaths, and replace garbled words with clearer ones whenever possible. These tiny tweaks can take a lot of time to execute well, but they can also make a big difference.

But perhaps even more important than any of these things is to preserve the character of the person we interviewed. We want to highlight the most interesting things they said, and remove any parts of the conversation where they might have been rambling a little or struggling to articulate what they were saying—but we don’t want to lose the personality. 

Going back to those storytelling basics, great characters are distinct. The way they speak, the energy they bring, the word choices they make—all of these make them who they are. Our goal in editing isn’t to sanitize them or make them generic, but to shine a light on all of the colorful, endearing, particular parts of themself that they’re passionate about. We want our guests to hear our episodes and think, “wow, I sound great—and they really captured the essence of who I am.”

Nate: Ironically, sometimes this means including less of them. If someone spoke for five minutes straight about something you can sum up well in fifteen seconds of VoiceOver, you may actually be able to highlight a part of their story better by including less of their actual voice. 

Our interviews are typical 45 minutes to an hour, and we often use only ten to fifteen minutes in the final cut—but with thoughtful summary and connection through VO, the guest will feel fully and accurately represented, and listeners see that person in their best light as well.

Laura: It’s not unusual for people to get a little nervous and blurt out a half-baked thought that they later backpedal away from, especially when the subject matter is a sensitive one. Unless there is a really compelling reason to keep that moment, we’ll almost always pull it out, because our goal is to make this person feel celebrated, not embarrassed because they said something less carefully than they intended. Just as interviewing is a skill that can be developed, being interviewed is a skill of its own—one that most people don’t have. We try to bring a lot of compassion to that process, and give people the benefit of the doubt, and ask follow up questions if they say something that we’re not sure we understand or that might have come out differently than they intended. 

Being kind in our editing also means moving things around so the order of the conversation follows a natural story arc where the conflict and tension are up front and the resolution comes at the end. It means thinking carefully about the music choices in the episode, and how we can use both those choices and silence to spotlight or focus our listeners’ attention on what our guests are saying. 

We offer all of our guests the option of hearing the episode prior to publication, and the ability to request edits if needed.

Only on one or two occasions has anyone requested that we make edits, and usually they’re small, but we’ve had a number of times when the content of the episode was sensitive, and our guests communicated that they really appreciated the way we honored their stories and took their experience into consideration.  

I will say that the way we do things is not typical in podcasting. It means more work for us, and often a tighter timeline. But we feel committed to this standard in our own code of conduct, because the types of people we ask for interviews are people who on some level share our desire for making this world a better and more equitable place for all of us. 

Nate: Step 6: follow up again after the episode goes live.

After the episode goes live, we send a thank you email with a link to the episode web page on our site, other links to where they can listen on various platforms, social media assets, and an invitation to sign up for our newsletter. 

If you have the capacity to send a handwritten note, do. When you post about the episode on social media, use it as another chance to celebrate them and the work they’re doing. If they gave permission, tag them if they’re on the platform. Let them know that you’d be grateful if they shared the episode with others, and that they have your permission to include the episode on their website (and give them the embed code to make it easier if they’re interested) — but also remember that it’s not your guest’s job to do marketing for your show. 

Laura: I’ve found that at least half the time—especially if the person is a famous public figure—the guest doesn’t even listen to the finished episode. Most guests don’t realize how much work goes into creating narrative podcast episodes, and they’re busy. But for the guests that do listen, we almost always hear back about how grateful they were that we portrayed them with such honor and respect, and that they felt celebrated. Finally, keep in touch. Have a database of your guests and their contact information so you can reach out down the road to keep them updated on what you’re doing.

Nate: For the coaching call this week, we’re asking you to come up with your own list of questions, your own way of saying, “tell me more.” You’re free to come up with questions in any way that’s helpful, but if you need some guidance, we recommend thinking about one softball question that you can open an interview with that will help your guest relax, one question that will invite your guest to talk about something they’re good at or that they enjoy, and taking a cue from Katie Semro in last weeks’ reflection, one really open-ended, speculative question that could go in lots of different directions.

Laura: We’ve also asked you to create your own audio editing triage list: what are the urgent things you always fix? What is the next category of things you like to fix? And then what’s the last group of things that you only do if you have time? 

We look forward to hearing your responses, and as always, we encourage you to submit them as a recorded voice memo to practice fine-tuning your own sense of great sound.