Inside News Nerds
Welcome to a special series documenting how News Nerds is booked, recorded, edited, written, and produced.
By Ezra Graham
Part 1: Booking
I hate to say it, but my least favorite part of producing News Nerds is booking guests. There have been weeks that I have failed to book a guest and have scrambled to fill time. Maybe you have noticed. At the same time, it is the most important part of producing the podcast. It’s also the most rewarding part of doing this; getting an intelligent guest to tell me about their lives evokes a special feeling inside of me. I’m sure that you can identify with this feeling in your own life.
To find eloquent guests to book, I rely on publishing imprints, other shows similar to News Nerds, and newspapers. These sources not only name potential guests, but give me a sense of how they talk. Usually I listen to at least one other audio interview before I send an interview request. Because there are so many radio shows, podcasts, etc., this is not hard. Shows that I like to refer to for booking are The Daily, Milk Street Radio, The Splendid Table, All Things Considered, Fresh Air, and occasionally opinion podcasts (both right and left leaning). I also refer to all major news organizations (Fox, The New York Times, PBS, etc.) and read publishing reviews - primarily for nonfiction.
When I have a potential interviewee, I check if they have a website with their contact information. If they are an author, I contact their publishing imprint. If they are a journalist, I can either contact their media organization or contact them directly. If they are represented by an agency like United Talent or Creative Artists Agency, I reluctantly draft an email to their agent, which I’ll explain in the next paragraph. Sometimes past guests offer to help me connect to other speakers. I also use a free service called hunter.io to track down contacts. Sometimes I can’t contact an interviewee, and that really bugs me (please, if Lynne Rossetto Kasper is reading this, this an official request for an interview).
Increasingly, I have to deal with publicists, PR agencies, and agents that represent the people that I interview, so instead of directly writing to a guest, I’m communicating with someone who I will never talk to again. I prefer skipping this middleman, just because I find that publicists are not as generous with their clients’ time as the client themself.
I remember an interview that I did where the interviewee logged onto Zoom and asked who I was. Apparently their publicist hadn’t told them that.
Here’s an example of the email I would send to a guest/their rep. I just sent this particular email to Patrick Radden Keefe. Cross your fingers that he says “yes!”
I start by explaining who I am and list some of our most well known guests. I like to change this list fairly frequently (because I love each guest equally!). This helps to showcase that I have interviewed other people similar to the guest I’m trying to book. Next, I directly invite the potential interviewee to an interview and explain the topics we’ll cover in an interview. Then I link the podcast and sign off. You might ask, “why do you hate this so much?” I hate booking because of several reasons. It’s repetitive. It’s dull. It’s frustrating when you don’t receive a response. It requires a bit of research which sometimes doesn’t pay off.
For the sake of this article, let’s walk through some hypothetical situations. Let’s say I don’t get a response. After about 2 weeks, I follow up with something like:
This increases response rates by a lot. If a person does respond, we coordinate a 30 - 40 minute time slot for an interview. Usually I record interviews after I get home from school - at around 4:00 MST. Currently, I record on Zoom, so I send a link to the interviewee.
I’ve probably left something out, so please ask any questions you have in the comments. Stay tuned for Inside News Nerds, Part 2: The Interview.
