Since television and radio stations sell air time, every program is planned right down to the second. Electronic media programmers live by the stopwatch. This means that a television crew taping an interview at your office or campaign headquarters may spend an hour – usually less – conducting the interview. But what you typically see on the evening news is a ten-second clip, which may or may not be a fair depiction of what you were trying to say and the messages you were trying to get across.
A typical 30-minute local television newscast contains about as much written copy as one column in the Wall Street Journal. That 30-minute newscast is about 22 minutes of news, weather and sports, after time is allotted for commercials. So unless your main points are clearly stated throughout your interview, they may be missed. Your main points may also be lost if you try to qualify your answers with too many conditions, if you use too many examples or statistics, or if you lapse into technical or “insider” jargon. Your job is to convert complex information into terms and anecdotes that the general public can easily understand and to which they can readily relate.
What television reporters want, and what serves you best, is a brief, clear and concise statement that communicates your position in less than 20 seconds. Remember, the average “sound bite” today is about ten seconds or 25 words - so brevity and clarity are essential to a successful interview.
The same is true for radio interviews, where ten-second “sound bites” are the preferred length. A common practice in radio is to tape an entire interview over the telephone, extract one or two ten-second excerpts from the tape and write a brief story about the topic. Your quotes, in the words of one veteran radio news director, will be “icing on the cake,” with the thrust of the story being written and read on the air by the reporter who conducted the interview.
 | 3. Understanding the Media | Page 5 of 17 | Newspapers |  |