Running Radio Interviews
A new part of my job is to run my office’s ISDN booth for radio interviews during the afternoon. I set the booth up for the interview, establish the connection with the radio program, help the person being interviewed get settled, then listen in another room in case there are any problems that might require my attention.
I think I average about one session a week. Some weeks, there are several interviews; others, there are none.
In the few years since we’ve had the booth, more than 100 members of the Harvard community have been in our studio. We’ve worked with many different radio programs, including those affiliated with the BBC and National Public Radio.
Here are some things I especially like about running the interviews:
- Recently, a producer called me after a taping to thank me for coordinating a late afternoon interview on short notice. Many times, they say thanks during the course of the interview, but that usually is after the recording or live broadcast is finished, so it doesn’t make it on the air.
- Sometimes the radio program mentions the interview is coming from Harvard on the air, like in this National Public Radio interview with Samantha Power that aired on Saturday, August 7.
- The coworker who runs the booth in the morning was named on the air for his work with an interview a few months ago.
- I can learn a little bit more about a host’s personality while listening to him get an interviewee settled and ready for discussion.
- Like everything else in news, I get to learn all sorts of neat things in the process of running an interview.
- It seems like a really quirky skill for a librarian to have.
August 10th, 2004 at 9:40 am
What is the most interesting problem you have had in connection with one of those interviews?
What is the ISDN connection? Single, dual or more? All the technical details please.:)
August 10th, 2004 at 12:08 pm
The biggest problem I’ve had so far (::knocks wood::) is establishing an international connection. Usually, the station doing the interview dials into our booth. I’m not an engineer and I think the problem was on the other end, so I don’t know exactly what was happening. I was able to dial their machine with out any problems.
Our machine is capable of many different settings: L2, L2 Mono 128, and G.722 seem to be the popular ones.
August 12th, 2004 at 1:21 pm
Thanks. Hopefully you’ll always be able to get around those link problems.
Is G.722 favored by those conducting more to and fro interviews? It’s supposed to have a much lower delay than MPEG Level 2 audio (maybe 10ms instead of 300-400ms) so it might be better for that if there’s a lot of interjecting going on. Or maybe it’s just because it’s a 64kbps option, so it’s good for single channel ISDN.
August 12th, 2004 at 5:24 pm
I have no idea. Dammmmmit, James, I’m a librarian, not an engineer. ha ha ha (That’s a really bad Star Trek joke and James doesn’t like to be called Jim.)