How To Become A Great Interviewer (Part 2)
A collection of pro tips shared from pro interviewers.
The Turnaround is a new podcast by Jesse Thorn where he interviews interviewers. Six episodes in, it’s one of my favorite new podcasts to listen to. Having just started my own interview podcast, I listen to The Turnaround with the intent to learn from some of the best and most experienced interviewers.
To read Part 1, click here.
Below is a summary of my favorite pro tips as shared by the next three guests on The Turnaround: Audie Cornish, Larry King, Brooke Gladstone.
Larry King
Larry King is a legendary radio personality.

To set the stage for the interview, Larry King advises to make yourself comfortable by telling the person how you feel about them, how you admire them when you were a kid, what they meant to you before you go on.
Larry describes himself as a modest interviewer. He is not afraid to ask a simple question: “Be dumb; your success is to play dumb.”
“Dumb is a great road to success.”
To him, the simplest question in the world is “Why did you do this.” or what he calls street questions like “Ey. What a you doin’.”
“I’m always who, what, where, when, why — lotta of whys. Short questions. I hate interviewers who don’t ask questions but make statements.”
On preparation he says: “The less I know [going into an interview], the better.”
He says he has no method to interviewing. His goal is to get a sense of pace, to draw people out, to feel when and that something is going well. He recommends to get to the basics. He says that you can learn a lot from the basics.
His role is to ask the good questions when people bring up a topic: “If you don’t listen, you’re not a good interviewer.” He advises against coming in with a list of questions and to try to get from the fourth question to the fifth question without listening to the answer of the fourth question because you’re focused on asking the fifth question.
“Sometimes the simplest questions you learn so much, cause they are things I wonder about.”
He once asked a pilot: “When you’re going down the runway, do you know it’s going to take off?” or an expert on diabetics: “What does the word mean?” and the expert didn’t know.
I never went on the air with an agenda. I was there to learn. If you have an agenda you’re not going to learn.
His favorite questions: basic “Help me understand” questions.
Things he avoids saying: ”Let me ask you this…” or “I’m wondering…” — ask the question, that’s what you’re there for.
Audie Cornish
Audie Cornish is the host of NPR’s All Things Considered.

Audie shares that — as opposed to her peer Susan Orlean at The New Yorker who never prepares specific questions–one of her pet peeves is people who are not prepared. That’s perhaps because Audie records 4–5 interviews every single day. She prepares questions in advance and rewrites them several times before going into the interview.
Before every interview, Audie briefs her interviewees about what she calls her version of the “Miranda rights”. She explains what exactly is going to happen during the interview, she asks her subjects to keep their answers brief, and that she will only follow up with questions for clarity or for more context. She ensures to let people know exactly what is going to happen (“First we will play music, and then we’re going to discuss…”).
One of her favorite questions to ask: “What haven’t I asked that I should’ve?”
Her book recommendation: Terry Gross — “All I Did Was Ask”
Brooke Gladstone
Brooke is the co-host and managing editor of WNYC’s ‘On the Media’.

“I think more like an editor and I interview more like an editor than a host.”
Brooke and her team of producers prepare every interview in advance to ensure that all fundamental questions are covered and that she has all relevant quotes from other publications by her interviewee. Brooke presses their interviewees and asks several times if she believes the question has not been answered. She uses different variations of the same questions if needed.
She usually doesn’t follow a list of questions but imagines the arc of the story and bases her conversation around that arc and the outcome she is hoping to achieve. She says that almost every interview is about what we think we know but that we don’t really know or that we’re wrong about. She wants every interview to have answered “What are the stakes?” and “Why should I [the listener] care?”
Her process for stories that are not a news story: jump into the heart of the issue, step back and talk about the history, bring up previous examples, go to the main protagonist and their background, get to the stakes and the larger message for everybody, and end on an emotional peak. She found that this process usually brings her interviewees to end up talking about why they actually care about the topic that much because they’ve been talking about it for a while.
One important insight from Brooke is to not be afraid of silence. She says just to let the silence fill the space. Eventually, she says, the person will talk. And if they don’t answer, ask why they didn’t answer the question.
It’s worth noting that her show is about the media, and that she interviews media professionals who are trained to talk around a answer.
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