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Wednesday, December 28, 2005

French podcast interview makes waves

There’s plenty of blogospheric buzz over Loic Le Meur’s podcast interview with French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. (Le Meur is Six Apart‘s top European executive and a prolific blogger.) Despite the lack of any shocking revelations, the interview caused a stir because, well, French politicians just don’t engage in such behavior. Granting interviews to producers of non-traditional media like podcasts is just unseemly. But Sarkozy not only granted the interview, but conducted it in an informal manner that the French just loved. Now there’s an expectation that more French politicians will seek out podcasters.

One note, buried within the Business Week coverage of the Le Meur-Sarkozy interview, caught my attention:

Le Meur says some journalists have criticized him for going too easy on Sarkozy. But he says, “I didn’t want to be confrontational. I did this mainly for my own enjoyment, and to learn more myself.”

Must podcast interviews emulate journalistic standards? God forbid a debate erupts overwhether podcasters are journalists—we’ve had enough of that with the bloggers-as-journalists debate. As a former journalist, I know how to conduct an interview when covering a story, but have never taken that approach with one of the interviews Neville and I conduct for “For Immediate Release.” Our approach to FIR interviews is simple: Our listeners are interested in what the interview subject does, so we’re going to go in-depth to satisfy some of that curiosity. We’re interested in adding to the knowledge base, not confronting our guests in the hopes of generating some headlines.

(We might have taken a different approach with Anil Dash of Six Apart, who originally agreed to an interview following the recent Typepad outage, but never responded to Neville’s follow-up emails.)

I’ve also listened to a lot of podcast interviews, including many of the excellent sessions John Furrier conducts of PodTech. I’ve never heard Furrier get confrontational with his subjects; I’ve also never heard him criticized for failing to be more aggressive. Just as well; I like hearing the answers Furrier’s guests offer in response to questions I might have asked.

So, I fully support Le Meur when he shrugs off criticism for going easy on Sarkozy. The only podcasters who should be held to the standards of a “60 Minutes” expose are those that promote themselves as journalistic endeavors. For the rest of us, a friendly conversation is just fine.