5 Ways to Help Your Clients Deliver Awesome Email-Based Interview Responses
Plus, the pros and cons of this format
Happy Monday!
Since I’m heading to San Diego on a press trip tomorrow, I wanted to send a paid newsletter your way (read: I won’t be sending out my normal request for pitches this week).
Let’s talk about email-based interviews, which probably makes up about 60% of the interviews I conduct these days.
There are 2 main benefits of email-based interviews to both the journalist and your client:
Scheduling. It can be difficult to coordinate schedules these days, so the beauty of an email-based interview is that your client can answer on their own schedule …. whether they are sitting in the school drop off line, in between patients/customers, or at 3 am when they can’t sleep and are catching up on work.
Accuracy. A written email provides a black-and-white transcript of their exact wording, so there are no questions/discrepancies once something publishes.
Of course, there are also a couple drawbacks to missing out on a live chat:
Follow-up questions. Sometimes, a source’s response to a question will spark another idea/angle I’d like to explore or I’d like to dig deeper into their response, which means I’ll have to send a follow-up question and you’ll have to engage your client a second time to complete the interview.
Lack of spontaneous discussion. Often, I get my best nuggets/soundbites from the small talk that naturally occurs during a live interview, or I can reframe a question if I’m not getting the type of answer I’m looking for. This just cannot be replicated via email.
Based on these pros and cons (I’m sure I’m forgetting a few), I’ve found that email-based interviews work best for lighter topics, roundups, and articles where I only need a small amount of information that’s fairly surface-level.
On the flip side, I rely more on phone interviews when the topic is complex, it’s a feature-length article, or I want to delve more deeply into the subject matter (especially when they’re an expert at the top of their field … I love getting real-time access to their brilliant brains!).
I’ve noticed that when conducting email-based interviews, I’m consistently running into the same few problems over and over … but these situations shouldn’t be the norm. So let’s explore them and how to coach your client into becoming an excellent email interviewee that journalists can rely on: