Will Wilkinson interviewed me for Bloggingheads today, and it was a disaster. I was too relaxed and I treated it as a conversation rather than a formal presentation or interview. As a result, I did too much b.s.-ing and too much conversational yapping, and not enough presentation of our research findings. I also said a bunch of things that are interesting or funny in informal conversation but probably come off as obnoxious or off-the-cuff in an interview that can be viewed interactively.
It’s too bad, because my Red State, Blue State presentation is fun and informative, and I think the radio interviews I’ve done (with lengths ranging from 5 minutes to an hour) have gone well also. The two things that threw me off:
1. I’ve met Will before and I felt comfortable with him, hence too relaxed. Will was an excellent interviewer and gave me many opportunities to explain things; it wasn’t his fault that I spouted off too much.
2. I’ve already spoken with Will about the book and so it was hard for me to remember to start from scratch–the audience won’t necessarily be familiar with it.
3. Seeing my image in front of me while I was talking made me extra-focused on not twitching–always a bad thing. In a face-to-face or telephone interview, I usually forget about the twitching after a minute or so. Trying to suppress it takes a lot of mental effort that would be better used to think about my responses.
It would’ve been better to have some written talking points in front of me to keep me focused. The funny thing is, I did that for my early radio interviews but as I got more used to the format, I started speaking more off the cuff and it was going fine. This was just an interview too far. I had fun while it was happening, but afterward I realized what had gone wrong.
Anyway, it felt good to get this off my chest.
That's what people are looking for from bloggingheads and it is what they expect to find there. Your complaint is essentially that you conformed to the genre.