How to Do Radio Interviews

 

Am trying to teach a intro  radio class on how to prepare and create a good in depth interview for a public affairs radio  show on a station like KPFA ie not NPR ,  and am looking for material that explains how to develop an idea for a piece, what is a good subject and how narrow or broad a subject should be etc;   then how to  research it and then how to best formulate questions etc.  I know it may sound simple but unbelievably people often don't get what makes a good interview and how to do one..

so any handout or audio talks on this subject you can recommend would be much appreciated.


1. The KPOV is perhaps the most comprehensive and talks both about news and about talk shows, even sports broadcasting.  One of the nice things is that it has exercises so it would be easy to take specific parts and use them for the curriculum. http://www.nfcb.org/PDF/KPOVCitJournHndbk.pdf.  Section 6 may be useful for you. 

2. Another resource Creating Content from the  Farm Radio International.  http://www.farmradio.org/english/partners/resources/creating-content.asp  This is shorter, but covers less territory than the KPOV manual. It has a nice international flavor as it was created by Canadians for an African radio network. 

3. Also there is the Social Reporting Toolbox (http://srtoolbox.wikispaces.com/ and also at http://www.kstoolkit.org/Social+Reporting) Although the main link at kstoolkit is broken there are some other resources related to the toolbox on that page.  It is focused on reporting on an political/social/scientific event and goes beyond radio to also include information about creating and uploading stuff to web/social media. 

4. There are several guides for youth radio.  I just googled "youth radio curriculum" and got quite a list of unknown quality and relevance.  

One curriculum that was quite extensive and in my opinion quite well done was the Youth Visions curriculum created by the CTCnet folks.  This was an intensive curriculum oriented toward getting youth to create video about their communities but had extensive interviewing (and most everything else) resources. At one point it was going to be released for free, but I do not see such a link on the CTCnet pages.   It might be worthwile to follow the contacts on this page (http://www.ctcnet.org/youthvisions/phases.html) although CTCnet seems to be mostly defunct. Tony Streit (http://www2.edc.org/eec/staff/tstreit.asp) was involved in listing it through the Education Development Center at one point, but I do not now see a link on their site either.