On the Tee-Vee: Some Notes for Academics

K.E. Saavik Ford, Science

I’ve been lucky to do a fair number of press interviews, either based on my own work or commenting on interesting astronomy news events, so I think I might now ‘count’ as a ‘public intellectual’! I’ve learned a lot at this point about how to do press interviews, so Betsy & Holly asked if I might share some tips & tricks with other faculty here in the Inquirer.

The first thing to know is how to get on, and get called back. The most important thing you can do is reply quickly to requests, preferably with a yes, or else suggest other folks who would be good. By quickly, I mean within minutes to at most hours. Producers and journalists are on tight deadlines and they need a yes/no almost immediately—but you will then have some time before the interview when you can prepare yourself. This is good, you will need it!

When I’ve done TV interviews, folks often tell me I look so natural & comfortable—but that is an act, which comes from preparation & practice! I might spend two hours preparing my materials for a five-minute TV spot—these are the highest pressure situations; I might do an hour prep for a half-hour interview with a print journalist.

What takes two hours? First: guess the questions. It’s like an exam—you have a pretty good guess what they might ask. Then prep your answers—make sure you have all the facts at your fingertips (for one spot I had to look up the distance to M87 & the depth of Ganymede’s ocean, for example–and that interview ended up never touching the Ganymede topic!).

Then: make your facts useful to laypeople—so what if LISA is a gravitational wave detector in the milliHertz frequency band? It’s far more useful to say it’s an observatory that will find supermassive black hole binaries that have millions of times the mass of our Sun—but which are smaller than the size of our solar system—spiraling into each other. Not only that, it will find many other kinds of gravitational waves, and it will hear all of them, from every direction simultaneously! Understanding our data from LISA will be like calling a friend in a crowded bar—some folks want to hear the friend; others want to hear some of the background conversations; other folks want to hear the band (yes, the bar has a band); still other folks want to hear the pyrotechnics the band is setting off… and actually predict when they’ll explode, based on the sound of the launchers (this is, by the way, a total mess of a science problem, in case you wonder what I lose sleep over… but we have 10 years before launch to solve it).

The point is: you always want to draw a mental picture for your audience, and you want to come up with good analogies and soundbites. That’s what prep is for—you have very limited time with your interviewer so you have to have everything at your fingertips.

‘At your fingertips’ means it should come out smooth, so: have someone lob the questions at you like an interviewer and practice answering. Have a timer going. Try to answer in 60 seconds or less. Do it again. And again.

And again.

I think I answered ‘what’s the big idea behind this pic of M87?’ seven times the afternoon before I did an interview about it. The last time Barry McKernan asked me the questions for practice, I rolled my eyes and complained, ‘Again?!?’

Yup. But on air, it was to the point and ‘natural’!

You need less smoothness and tight timing for ‘offline’ print interviews, but having the facts built into an interesting picture is still extremely valuable. You can practice answers just once or twice—but make sure you are practicing with words coming out of your mouth—in your head doesn’t count, as I’m sure my speech and theater department colleagues would agree!

Finally: if you’re going on TV… we’ve all seen ourselves on Zoom a lot lately, so you are probably less awkward than I was on my first TV appearance… but, look at the camera (or interviewer, if directed to), and don’t be frozen. Smile, nod, move a little. Don’t look like you might possibly have died (which is a thing someone said about an early interview of mine!).

I hope this is useful to folks—and I just want to be clear: interviews are a skill you can develop. I’ve been fortunate to have gotten a bunch of media training over the years (including as a political and labor activist), and that, plus practice and prep have helped me get pretty good at it. Being good and answering texts from reporters quickly (for years) are how I eventually got on rotation for ‘space stuff’ at NBC! So please remember whenever you see a talking head—it isn’t just about the five minutes (or less) that you see on the air. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes!

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