How to be interviewed for telly – a guide for scientists.

Part I – the news interview


This week there’s a story in the news. The headline basically is “giant dinosaur-eating frog discovered”. The news story seems to be that this is the largest fossil frog ever discovered and that it ate baby dinosaurs.

The truth of the matter is that this frog is no bigger than the biggest frogs alive today and that that nobody’s got any idea what it ate. In addition, the Discovery channel has just launched a programme about re-incarnating dinosaurs using the DNA of chickens.

There’s a recurrent theme about the way science is reported which comes up on one of the paleontology mailing lists I’m on every time such programmes and items appear.

Those who watch knowing the story from the inside get frustrated about lack of accuracy and the media obsession with drama and those who get interviewed get annoyed about being asked to constantly simplify and dumb down everything they say – only to have their comments edited down to nothing or completely misrepresented when the show airs..

Quite right too. There’s a lot of rubbish reporting of science that goes on. However, I’m coming at it from the other side of the camera and I think one positive thing to do is give a few clues to scientists being interviewed for TV.

I hope people both from the science side and the reporting side can add to this and we can build up an advice sheet for prospective interviewees – so here’s my first stab at a scientist’s guide to how to be interviewed for telly:

Right: the idea of the game is to get your message across. You want to communicate he excitement of your subject, the new advances that are being made and maybe you want to push your own take on things and correct a few public myths.

Make no mistake, the interviewer wants that too – and the thing they’re most aware of in doing this is that most people are watching with the remote in their hand and nobody’s going to get anything over once the button gets pushed.

Tip 1: know what type of interview you’re doing and how that changes the game:

News interviews
The interviewer is making a 3 minute piece – two minutes of which will probably be them setting the scene, linking the piece and summing it up. They’ll probably have two (opposing) interviewees and that means each gets 30 seconds if that.

Politicians when faced with this scenario have a very clear strategy. They work out what their line is – boil it down to a 10 second sound byte and say that in response to WHATEVER QUESTION IS ASKED.

They don’t care how badly the answer fits the question because the interviewer is going to be cut out anyway.

The aim is to say what YOU want to say. Say it clearly and succinctly using several different variations of language. The editor will then have to find a way to cut around you. They won’t leave you out because they won’t have time to get another interviewee – and anyway why should they? You’re the expert and your take on the subject is important.

Looked at in a slightly more favourable way, this technique means the producer isn’t fumbling around with his or her weak knowledge of the subject trying to pick out the significant moment of your hour long discourse. After all, they’ve only got a couple of hours to shape the piece before the news airs! Know your line and don’t be afraid to stick to it – and you give the producer something to build their work around.

The news reporter has time against them, so will want to come to you having already written their piece. They’ll want you to simply fill in the blanks – no digression, no interesting side issues – just get to the point.

Unfortunately, they’ll have written their idea of the piece using the info they’ve read in whatever other media broke the story, a press release from whoever’s made the discovery that made this item NEWS and if you’re lucky, the background research they’ve done on wikipedia.

You can be pissed off about this or you can work with it. Working with it means making sure that if it was you that wrote the press release you did it properly (and I’ll try to cover this technique some other time). If you didn’t. it means briefing the journalist when they first phone you.

I know that’s hard to do when you’re not expecting a call from CNN asking you about giant dinosaur eating frogs, but the best thing to do is say “yes” to the interview and then call them back 5 minutes later once you’ve gathered your thoughts.


Interviewers will constantly try to get you to simplify. Think about politicians again: economic policy is complicated, politics is complicated. However, when asked for a news quote, politicians have no choice but to boil down the issues into a single sentence that doesn’t just state the facts, but makes it clear why they hold the view they do and what their perspective is.

It’s a hell of a skill, but don’t think that a sound byte is necessarily a dumbing down of an argument:

“Power to the people” is s a sound byte.
“I have a dream” is a sound byte
“thow shalt not kill” is a sound byte.
"e=mc^2" is a sound byte

Richard Feynman once said that if you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t understand it.

And that’s a sound byte too.

Above all, be realistic about what you can say in half a minute and try if you can to get in early and get the journalist to understand the issues you think are important before they write their piece to camera!


Oh – and if you can be holding something, pointing at something or standing next to something that illustrates the point, do it (as long as it doesn’t have logos, copyrights or trademarks on it)!


‘Tomorrow: part 2 on documentary interviews!