Interviewing and Story Telling with Ira Glass and Richard Fidler

The interview I listened to was really interesting in that it was between two professional interviewers on the topic of interviewing! Richard Fidler, host of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio’s most popular podcast, Conversations with Richard Fidler, interviewed Ira Glass, host of the multi-award winning radio show This American Life, and explored how he became such a skilled interviewer.

The interview comes across as more of a conversation between professionals in the same field, though Fidler is the one directing the conversation through his questioning. I guess the interview is a form of practice-oriented research in that they are discussing what it takes to become a proficient radio interviewer. In a way, they are both researchers within the interview, as they reflect together on how Glass developed his professional competencies. The flow of the interview seems pretty casual, as Fidler takes Glass chronologically through his career from his early days to his later days. Most of the questions seemed pre-planned, though Fidler gives Glass plenty of room to expand on the questions, including allowing for noticeable pauses before he asks another question. Some of the “questions” are merely observations or comments that invite Glass to pick up on; in one case [Q7], Glass is unsure of the prompt and asks for clarification. Fidler takes a neutral stance throughout the interview; there are no “gotcha” questions – he is inquiring into what Glass has developed as his “best practice” though tracing his professional development.

            Some of the notable points include when Fidler remarks that “so much of bad radio is someone trying to impersonate a radio presenter” and when Glass reveals that he “kills” half or more of his material (“more than other broadcasters”). For the author of the piece introducing the interview, his take-home advice is “Speak in your own voice without imitating someone else”. For me, it is clear that it is an interviewer's professional confidence and his own comfortableness, which in turn make the interviewee comfortable, that is the key to conducting a good interview. Listening to Glass and Fidler talk is more like eavesdropping on two guys talking about their work over a beer rather than a “staged” interview. The relaxed nature of their interaction sure makes for easy listening.

 Interviewing and Story Telling with Ira Glass and Richard Fidler

For class this week, I listened to Richard Fidler (host of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s most popular podcast Conversations with Richard Fidler) interview Ira Glass (host of the multi-award winning This American Life radio program) on his secrets behind doing great radio interviews in the style of his show. (Transcript of questions from 4:12 - 21:12)

1. What was your first job, in radio? Were you aimed at it like an ambitious kid or did you sort of accidentally back into public radio?
2. You were a journalist for a while; how long did it take you to get good? [522]
3. So much of bad radio is someone trying to impersonate a radio presenter, same with TV journalism; you’re impersonating. It leads you to feel inauthentic. Is that what you think you are doing in this clip? [733] (“this is me, 7 years in”)
4. So, who knocked that out of you? Did someone come along and say “knock it off” or did you just realize that yourself, to actually start to talk like a normal person on the radio? [750]
5. Malcolm Gladwell’s theory about people needing to spend 10,000 hours at anything to be seriously seriously good at it - Do you think there’s a similar, kind of, lesson there for you? [823]
6. I’m going to ask you to cast your memory back a bit Ira to a story you did at Lincoln Park High School – the making of that story – changed your approach to making radio documentaries; do you want to just talk a bit about that story if you can remember, and what changed and finding the right people to talk too in order to make that documentary story live? [1000]
1. “be armed with the ability to make small talk” (music / movies / internet)
2. RF gives IG time to wander
3. Of a writer “he’s out to amuse himself”
7. It sounds like you are talking about is, ehm, you are trying to always look to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time, and give that to the listener too… [1541]
1. IG questions “conflicting ideas”
2. These Wall Street guys are total dicks – I really really like these guys. They are responsible for everything that’s gone wrong – I wanna hang around them a little bit longer…
8. When you started TIL, I think it was ’95, straight away it sounds really different; already it must have sounded really hugely different. Did you find at the time, you had to train your listeners to listen, train your audience to listen to what you were trying to do? [1644]
9. There’s no want of depth in the show; it sounds like you had to train people to see that was there because you weren’t talking in the normal radio voice… [1815]
10. You mention there a story test about, eh, sympathy; do you have other tests? Do you put your stories to a, kind of, series of tests? [1941]
11. Do you have to be prepared to kill your babies? You know, comedy writers talk about, no matter how much you might love and treasure a joke, if its just not working you have to destroy it, throw it out: “killing your baby” I think is based on a Fitzgerald quote or something like that. Do you have a similar process like that – a ruthlessness? [2024]
1. It’s baby genocide; we kill half of it or more