Interview and Talkshow training – get the basics right and listen

Interviews can be daunting and challenging for young journalists – especially if they are broadcasting live or moderating a talkshow dealing with controversial topics. In this guest blog post, Carsten von Nahmen, Head of the DW-AKADEMIE Africa Team, offers some insight on getting the basics right.

During a recent training workshop with 16 young radio journalists in Namibia, we offered a straightforward strategy to begin producing good interviews:

"All you have to do is define your goal, think about a good opening question and then LISTEN. That will help you to determine what follow-up question you should ask next."

Obviously, it's not that simple, at least not from the start. The best interviewers will tell you how important it is to be prepared, and each interview you do will gradually build your experience.

Lots of heads nodded in agreement when we asked if they had heard interviews on the radio sounding like a survey – a journalist reading from a list and going from one prepared question to the next.

Instead of conducting an interview as a questionnaire, we guided our participants to turn interviews into a real conversation, making it far more entertaining and worthwhile for listeners. After all, we are producing talkshows for our listeners. They need to hear journalists engaging with their interview partners and responding to what they are actually saying.

Fortunately, our participants were very open to trying out new things and this attitude paid dividends quickly. After only a few days of training, they gave their "sparring partners", politicians and NGO activists, as well as spokespeople of government and private businesses, an appropriately hard time in a series of interview and talk-show exercises under live studio conditions.
For many of our participants, this way of interviewing, of having a more dynamic and engaging conversation with an interview partner is something new. Hopefully, it will influence programming when they return to their home stations. It was also pleasing to hear their feedback. Leonard Nandu is an executive producer with the Silozi Service of the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation. Leonard says: "An interview can reveal dark secrets and funny aspects of a human being. The bottom line in any interview is to have a goal. You have to ask yourself, why you want to interview that person."

Carsten von Nahmen and Jasper Funck conducted a six-day training workshop in Windhoek in cooperation with the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). The workshop brought together presenters and producers from NBC's various language services from all over the country as well as journalists from community radios in Windhoek (BASE FM), Rehoboth (LIVE FM) and Keetmanshoop (KARAS FM). The training is part of a regional DW-AKADEMIE program on Local Reporting in Southern Africa, designed to support community radio stations, small commercial radio stations and local bureaux of public broadcasters in the region.