Pogue’s Top Ten Interview Tips

Pet peeves and small suggestions for better bites

After a recent “CBS Sunday Morning” shoot, my interview subject surprised me. Instead of thanking us and heading for the exit, he said: “Hey, could I talk to you in private?”

This guy, who’s fairly well-known, revealed that he’s in discussions to host a talk show. And he wanted to know if I had any tips for conducting good interviews!

I mean, I’m no Barbara Walters, and I make plenty of mistakes. But after 24 years of doing “CBS Sunday Morning” stories, I’ve thought a lot about interview technique—mine and others. How could it go better? What gets the best responses from subjects? What’s annoying to viewers?

I promised this guy that I’d write up some tips and email them to him, which I did. And today, I figured I’d share the document with you, too.

1. All that really matters is your own curiosity.

If you’re not genuinely interested in the person or the topic, you’re doomed. You’ll show up with some piece of paper with questions, written by you or a producer or ChatGPT, and the phoniness will leach right out of the screen.

I don’t even like to be holding notes in my lap. If you can swing it, the conversation feels more natural, more equitable, without them.

2. Do your prep.

The more you’ve researched the answers before the interview, the better shape you’ll be in. For two reasons.

First, you’ll ask questions that you already know have great answers. If you’ve learned that your subject, an actor, was once thrown from a horse and broke six ribs, you can ask, “I know you do your own stunts. But has that ever backfired?” You already know there’s a great story there.

Similarly, you’ll be ready to challenge someone’s BS. If they say, “Not one of my startups has ever failed,” and you’ve researched them, you’ll be ready with, “Well, what about that all-you-can-eat escargot bar that closed after two weeks?” or whatever.

3. Premeditate the structure.

The best interviews don’t ramble. They start somewhere and go somewhere. You can start it at the chronological beginning, for example, or you can start with the headlines—whatever made your subject newsworthy. But in your head, loosely map out the flow in advance.

Which brings us to:

4. Be ready to abandon your outline.

At the same time, if the conversation starts going somewhere interesting, let it go there! You can always come back to the stuff you had ready.

Subjects often say something wild. At that point, the whole audience is going to want you to say, “Whoa, whoa—what?” and pursue it.

In the end, it’s a conversation, not a checklist.

5. Save the touchy stuff for last.

If you have to interview someone controversial, where you know you’ll have to ask some tough questions, save them for the final part of the interview. That way, your subject will be warmed up and comfortable with you. (If, instead, you come in with guns blazing, you’ll get a hostile witness even when you do start asking easier questions.)

Also, this way, if you really piss them off, and they throw off their microphone and stalk away, you’ve still got some material in the can.

6. Shut up until they’re done.

Nothing’s worse than an interviewer who injects themselves into the interview. It was never about them in the first place, and it’s especially not about them when they interrupt.

Interrupting is usually bad for two reasons.

First, it makes you look rude.

Second, it derails what could have been a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime answer that your person was about to deliver! I see this all the time: The correspondent cuts off what sounded like it would be a great story or answer. Let’s HEAR IT!

(In interviews with non-celebrities, there’s a power dynamic in TV interviews: Your subject defers to you, assumes you’re the pro here. So if you interrupt them, they politely clam up instantly. The moment is gone.)

There are sometimes good reasons to interrupt. For example, if they’re using terminology or references that your audience won’t understand, you gotta get them to define it before they get too far into the story.

Them: “I think my career really began with Umami Shorts. That’s when—”

You: “Oh, that YouTube series that became a teen hit in Japan?”

Them: “Yeah. By the time I was 25, it was getting millions of views…” etc.

Interrupting is also OK if you have a rambler on your hands: Someone who just won’t shut up. At that point, your job becomes crowd control. You’ve probably heard radio hosts do this a thousand times: They cut the person off with a positive remark, and then move on.

Them: “I try to work out every morning. I have this trainer who comes in, Felix, who used to be a pro wrestler. Not the fake kind they have on TV—I hate that. I mean like the regular Olympic wrestling. I once got tickets to see The Rock, back in the day, and I swear, he was the real deal. I mean, he still had hair then—”

You: “Well, your workouts must be working. You look great!”

7. Shut up after they’re done.

This tip is as old as the hills, but it’s pure gold:

If you pause for a few seconds after an answer concludes, the resulting silence might make your subject blurt out something really juicy. They want to fill that dead air—it’s a natural impulse in any conversation—so they keep talking. A super useful trick—mostly for tough news interviews, although it can be good for celebrity interviews, too.

8. Don’t echo.

This is my ultimate pet peeve. My wife Nicki rarely gets to hear an interview all the way through, because I’m already yelling at the TV. “STOP DOING THAT, you idiot!”

It’s a tic that some interviewers employ when they can’t think of anything useful or thoughtful to say to a subject’s response: They just parrot the subject’s answer.

Them: “By age 25, I’d made 14 million dollars.”

You: “14 million dollars?”

(Yes, dumbass. They just said so.)

I’ve heard interviewers who literally run through two rounds of that air-filler.

Them: “The snow beneath our feet is a thousand feet thick.”

You: “A thousand feet thick!?”

Them: “A thousand feet thick.”

You: “A thousand feet thick!”

(If anyone ever does that to me, I’m just gonna say, “Yes. Would I have said it if I didn’t mean it?”)

9. Don’t put on a new personality.

I find it so off-putting when interviewers become someone new, someone fake, when the camera’s rolling. If you’re a genuinely curious person, you shouldn’t need to step into a phone booth and become Interviewer Person. It’s just a conversation. You already know it’s going to be interesting; your producers have given you an interesting person.

10. Look for ways to vary it up.

Any break away from talking heads provides refreshing color and variety to your interview—and to your audience.

If your subject says, “I used to be into magic,” see if they’ll do a trick for you. If they say they’re good at arm wrestling, ask them to arm wrestle. If they’re a world-famous a cappella group, see if they’ll sing for you.

Maybe I’m overthinking all this, and, of course, your taste may vary. But those are the tips I’d recommend to anyone who’s facing down their own TV show, conference panel, or dinner-party conversation.