Monday, November 28, 2011

TV Star Interviews

Today, I conducted a brief interview with Steve Arnold, star of the Science Channel television show "Meteorite Me." The season premier of the third season of the show is tonight (November 28) at 10:00 p.m. and both Steve and his cohost Geoff are looking to remind old fans and alert potential new fans of that fact.

I had spoken with Steve last year, as well, and published several fairly popular articles about the show. Today's interview ended up being published on three Yahoo! web properties: Associated Content, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! TV. It'll be interesting to compare the popularity of the three separate web locations of the same article.

Celebrity interviews are examples of going straight to the source for information. From a journalism perspective it's the same as interviewing the victim of a crime or other person with first-hand knowledge of an event or topic. Celebrities with something to promote may be easier to get as interview subjects because they also benefit by granting the interview as long as they get their plug into the interview. When the topic of the interview and the event being plugged coincide, such as an article about the season premier of a television show, everybody wins.

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Meanwhile, as per my last post, I'm still working on discussing the situation on the streets in Egypt with people who live there. I was surprised, although I shouldn't have been, that the first two people I contacted essentially refused to speak about it, saying they didn't know anything about it. I suspect that they simply didn't feel safe discussing their feelings about the current political situaion in Egypt.