"Creating Powerful Radio"

I thought that "Creating Powerful Radio" was an interesting reference point for conducting radio interviews. In fact, I actually took a class my freshman year at UT about conducting interviews and I felt that this article reflected many of the same lessons from that class. In my opinion, the most important rule of interviewing I learned that year was reflected in this article: eliminating questions that can be answered in one word like yes or no. I can't even begin to count how many times I've forgotten to remove these questions and ended up having a break in an interview as a result. Being able to go through an article and take out any yes, no, maybe, etc. questions took practice and repetition, but eventually became more natural and helped improve the quality of my interviews greatly. Refining and maintaining this skill goes a long way towards strengthening the flow of an interview and keeping an interviewee talking comfortably. In my interviewing experiences, this has been one of the best ways I've known to keep an interview smooth and interesting to the listener. Helping interviews to become conversational both helps and hurts an interview. The exchange often sounds natural and entertaining, but also lends itself to tangents and it becomes easy for the interviewer to talk too much. The article emphasizes this and other techniques one may use to host a successful interview. I particularly liked the suggestions of how to coax information from interviewees, as I hadn't heard about those in my interview class, and I thought they were clever. In general, though, this article resonates many of the same key points as that class did, particularly regarding how to make interviews as interesting as possible while keeping objectives of information.