Introducing RESONATE Workshops

Online. Informative. Dope.

RESONATE Online Workshops bring the insightfulness and quality of our in person festival sessions to your computer. This spring, log on to hear skilled producers share the lessons that make their work shine.

Presented on SoundPath.

WEbinar: Thursday, May 2 at 3pm PT / 6pm ET

How to Ask the Right Questions

A successful interview begins well before you press record. In this webinar, you’ll learn some of the techniques that will help you, as interviewer, get the tape that makes for a compelling, edifying listen — including booking guests, pre-interviewing for substance, and crafting the right questions.

Write your awesome label here.

Requirements

This class will be useful for just about anyone who plans to speak with a guest or help others do the same. That may mean anyone from novices just getting their first chat show off the ground, to news industry veterans aiming to refine their interviewing technique and streamline their editing process post-production.

About this webinar

Thursday, May 2nd, 2024.
3pm PT / 6pm ET
45 mins
Free from Resonate
This webinar is recorded and made available to all within a week of the recording.

Often what sounds simple and spontaneous on tape requires a great deal of preparation on the part of the interviewer and their producers and editors, work which the listener likely will never hear. This webinar will offer a glimpse of all that effort behind the scenes, and a little guidance on how to carry it out yourself.

This means starting to sketch out the heart of the story — its potential thesis, its key beats, and the threads to tie it all together — before finalizing your questions and pressing record. Here is how to pre-interview your guest, find their place in your broader story, foreground its emotional center, and set yourself up for streamlined edit afterward.

Key Takeaways

Before the interview begins, ask yourself: Where does this conversation fit in the context of your piece? Drill down to the one driving question, above all, that the conversation needs to answer to make the story work.
Speak with your guest before you start to record for real, and find the vital beats of their narrative — the details that stuck with you, the keys to building your case. These are the beats on which to build and elaborate your interview script.
In finding, speaking with, and editing a guest, center the human. Prioritize emotion over conclusiveness. Don’t shy from silences, difficult thoughts, or the points that defy your assumptions. This is where you find your emotional payoff.

Meet the PRESENTER

Theo Balcomb

Theo Balcomb created The Daily at The New York Times in 2017. Under her leadership, the podcast reached an audience of more than 4 million listeners a day and more than 200 public radio stations, won a duPont award, and served as part of multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning submissions from The New York Times. Before The Daily, she was the youngest-ever supervising producer of All Things Considered at NPR. These days, she is working as an independent editor and producer on projects across the audio industry, including the podcast Song Exploder and The Washington Post’s investigative series Broken Doors, a 2023 Pulitzer finalist.