Posted by: Brendan Greeley on October 22, 2005 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

Yesterday at Susan Stamberg's session on interviewing, Bob Edwards stood up to thank her for showing him how he could be him. Bob we have to thank for -- in addition to twenty-five years of Morning Edition -- sponsoring ice cream sundaes yesterday to promote The Bob Edwards Show on XM. Right here he's talking to Rene Gutel, a producer and host at KJZZ in Phoenix (and a Transom alum). I grabbed Bob for second this morning to talk about finding voice as an interviewer.

"Young people don't know who they are, they've been watching and listening to other people all their lives, and they're tempted to become their heroes. It's unfortunate, because broadcast media leave you vulnerable; people can spot a phony and they know you're trying to be somebody, whoever that is. But someone brand-new is exciting."

"When I started out, I wanted to be Murrow. I was very reserved, very deep, very businesslike, [affects a Murrow voice] rigid, I avoided any kind of anything that wasn't deadly serious. [end Murrow voice] And Murrow wasn't really like that, so I don't know what I was doing. But Susan was just so, so herself and such a natural, an engaging personality on the air. I woke up out of a fog. I realized that people like her because she's her, and then I started asking 'Who am I?'"

"You have more latitude to figure these things out at a station; I would definitely recommend that you spend time at a small station. I started out at a thousand-watt daytimer in New Albany, Indiana. George Burns used to say about vaudeville 'It's a good place to be bad.' He could bomb in Cincinnati, and by the time he got to Cleveland he'd figured out the bit. You go on national television and you bomb there, you're done, so I think you need to find a place to be bad."

"I'm freer to be me with the new gig. I'm not really doing breaking news, it's an interview program, and don't have all of those editors, subeditors, managing directors, telling me who I should be and how I should sound, even how I should pronounce words. I love NPR; I've been urging people on my show to support their local stations, I've been doing fundraisers for local stations, but I'm unshackled from all of the micromanagement now."

More from Third Coast Festival 2005 :
« I'll Buy You a Cup of Coffee | What they do in Australia »