Evan Davis, Scott Mills and Judy Finnigan were brought together as part of a staff training event at the BBC's Council Chamber in Broadcasting House by Razia Iqbal to discuss what makes a great interview. They shared their insights learnt from the hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews that they've conducted with the likes of rapper Jay-Z, politician Hillary Clinton and the anti-gay preacher Ugandan Pastor Solomon Male. [Who interviewed who is revealed below.]

The BBC College of Production will be posting a video of the event but in the meantime here are a few tips gleaned from the session:

"Sound authentic and be yourself" was Evan Davis's opening advice before he went on to say "Everything in my career has come down to two things: Blue Peter and Nationwide. With Blue Peter you can see that the presenters are genuinely interested in what people are saying."

Scott Mills said that his interviewing got better when he started relaxing and that often the hardest part of doing the interviews for his Radio 1 show wasn't the star but the huge entourage that they often brought with them. He related the story of being refused access to his own studio by one interviewee's security who asked him where he was going.

Judy Finnigan saw the interview as a conversation you might have at your kitchen table and that listening and responding to what people were saying was probably more important than having a long list of questions. For her nothing was more annoying that having a producer telling her what questions to ask in her ear mid-interview.

Paul Murphy is the acting editor of the blog

Evan Davis interviewed Jay-Z for the Today programme; Scott Mills interviewed Solomon Male for BBC Three's The World's Worst Place to Be Gay? and Hillary Clinton was interviewed by Judy Finnigan on the Richard & Judy show.
A video of The Art of the Interview will be posted on the BBC College of Production website where previous events and training films covering a range of topics including speech radio are available.
Rory Cellan-Jones has blogged about What do you do when an interviewee objects to a question? following his interview for BBC Click with Mike Lazaridis, CEO of RIM, the makers of Blackberry on the College of Journalism website.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/showcase

A few weeks ago we released our first version of the BBC Music Showcase and this week we have made some important tweaks to the site following user testing. We've had some comments following posts from my colleagues Andy Puleston and Matt Coulson, so I thought I'd write to tell you a bit more.

So what is Music Showcase and why is it important? What we've released so far is an aggregation of all the BBC music content that is not a full-length programme. Our radio station sites and iPlayer cover that angle fairly well, but what we haven't cracked until now is getting those nuggets of great content out of their full-length programmes to expose them in new ways. That content could be a live music session, or an interview with an artist, or a feature about a single artist, a DJ mix or a live concert. The BBC creates this kind of content in droves but it's almost impossible to find what you are really interested in unless you know exactly what was broadcast and at what time. Most web users don't have the patience for the time-consuming searching that this involves.

Now we can start to pull all those special moments out of their full-length programmes and offer them via genre, 'curated collections' or artist search - or via filters like 'most popular', 'latest in', and 'about to expire'. In other words, these unique pieces of content are now accessible and can be put together in collections which make sense to users. So, for example, we have a collection of great music clips taken from live music sessions right across the BBC, another of classic interviews, and the Best of the Festivals 2010.

Music Showcase is just the start. The next stage is 'curated collections': we want to tap into the world-class talent that the BBC employs to generate human-powered recommendations. Our music radio networks filter, curate and recommend music every single hour of every day. Filtering the vast amount of music available is at the heart of what our stations do: from a radio station playlist (like Radio 1's and Radio 2's), through to specialist music experts such as Gilles Peterson, Jez Nelson or Bob Harris. So far, we haven't capitalised on this online. The opportunity opening up to us now is to allow these musical experts to have a real voice on bbc.co.uk.

This development requires a fairly significant cultural change at the BBC, a move to understanding the value of elements of whole programmes, not just the programmes themselves. To go from understanding this to actually clipping music content from programmes will require changes to the way we work and some new tools. These things will take time, but the feedback so far suggests there's a real appetite for it.

This is good news for broadcast radio. We're doing something which takes the fantastic content we make every day in our broadcast output and offers it in an appropriate manner for our digital audiences. This is truly a mashup of traditional broadcast media with digital media. I believe that it's projects like this that will help traditional media brands move successfully into the fully digital world.

The Music Showcase is just one of the strands of work feeding into our thinking around radio and music online, as discussed on the BBC Internet blog by Erik Huggers, Director of BBC Future Media & Technology. One thing is for certain: music aggregation and music recommendations from BBC talent will continue to be an important part of what we offer in the future.

Have a play with the Showcase and leave a comment here to let me know what you think. Remember it's still in alpha mode so expect to see lots of small updates over the coming weeks and months.

Chris Kimber is Managing Editor, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

The picture shows the Rolling Stones in concert. They're included in the Music Showcase collection Rock 'n' Roll DNA.

BBC Radio Blog Feed

What Makes an Interview Distinctive and Engaging?

Music Showcase - a new way to find and enjoy BBC music content