Transcripts
1. Introduction: My goal as a storyteller has always been how do I bring people into something that they may not even think that they care about and make them walk away thinking, "Oh my god, I'm so grateful that I got to hear this story. I learned so much." I'm Soledad O'Brien. I'm a journalist. I've been a reporter and an anchor for about 30 years. Everybody needs to understand how to tell a story. You don't just have to be a journalist or a writer or someone who's working on a magazine article to want to tell a good story. Entrepreneurs need to understand what's their story. Anybody who's working in social media needs to understand the story. This class is about how to tell a good human-centered story and what those strategies are to make sure that, one, you find the person who you're going to focus on, who's going to be the star of your story. How do you make sure you have the right person? What is the story you're trying to tell? How do you make sure that you're telling an authentic story and that there are peaks and valleys in the story. One of the things that we've tried to do with the young women who we give scholarships to, who are part of the powerful foundation which I started with my husband, is to help them understand their story. If you're allowing somebody else to tell your story, they're probably not going to get it right. They might not even make you the star of your own story, and you might not even recognize yourself in the version of your story that somebody else does. Listen, this is a first step. This is the basics in how to do this well. The real secret is in doing it over and over and over again. I would say start here. Keep doing it, and by the end, you'll be pretty great. Hope you enjoy this class.
2. What Makes a Great Story?: This class is about human-centered stories, which very basically means not forgetting to keep the human at the center of your story which is sometimes done when we're storytelling. The key is to remember to try to tease out someone's humanity, not to put them in a box of this person's good, this person's bad, the story is this, but to remember that actually, people are very nuanced, and complicated, and messy. If you can really weave a story together that discusses all those complications and tries to understand the human being at the center, I think you can have some really great success in storytelling. You make it riveting for your listener. There's never a downside in being able to interview people, which is sort of a version of just talking to people and listening to people. Really, it literally is just listening to people. I think social media managers who are trying to transmit and tell the story of their company are talking to employees in the company, talk about company is its employees, right? It's what it builds, what it creates, and who it hires. If you are trying to tell the story of your company, you're telling the story of who works here, and here's the good we do in the world. That's basic storytelling. You have to be able to talk to people. If you're a social media manager, you, I'm sure, are talking to people every single day about the company. You know why do they use the product. Why do they enjoy working there. Listen, in some ways it's an easy skill, I think, but it takes time to get the hang of it. I know I am dragged across the country to interview people all the time. These are often companies that are full of very competent people who could do interviews. There is a skill to it. You have to hone that skill over time. The interesting thing about the world today is people have such finely honed bullshit detectors that if you're trying to pitch a story that is not authentic, not only will people laugh you out of the room, they'll come back to you with 25 stories of proving the exact opposite of what you're trying to pitch. I think for corporations, the really key thing is not only tell a story but make sure that that story is an authentic story. It has to be real, or that's problematic. In the same thing, frankly, in journalism, or any kind of storytelling, it can't just be we found this one person. I think it has to have a sense of that this is true. It's why in journalism, we use data to undergird the stories that we're telling. I think it's similar for whether you're doing journalistic storytelling, or storytelling around a company's mission, whether that company is a massive corporation, or you are an entrepreneur starting a small company. You got to get to the heart of what is true, what is the real authentic story. There's a path to getting somewhere. You have to authentically follow somebody's path. Most people's path is not I started here and it all went very smoothly to here. Usually, there's some starts, some stops and fits and things don't work. That's just real life. Again, I think it's back to being very authentic. The way it usually works, is that it doesn't work perfectly all the time, that there are some challenges. I think it's important to capture those challenges, again, because you're telling a real story about real people. As I tell people all the time, God is in the details. God is in the details, and there's a reason that is a famous saying because, God is in the details. The details are what will bring a person to life. For me, I think, the data points have always been critical. I think, in journalism, you have to have a why are we doing the story. It can't just be doing a story on this thing I thought was interesting. It has to be it's interesting to me because, here's why it matters, that you spend the next five, 10, 60, 75 minutes watching this. We've always undergirded our work with data to give context and help build understanding. Not everybody does. I think sometimes people just do here's a guy who's just wacky, and they're an interesting character and we'll follow them. Most cases of things that I find interesting, I think, there's some kind of context given. I think context is very, very critical. I think, at a time where people doubt facts, it also really helps to make it clear that this character-driven story exists in reality. It helps give a sense that this person fits into a bigger context, a bigger narrative, that they don't just exist alone as a personal story, but they're part of something. I think that's pretty important. I think asset framing versus deficit framing has to be something that you're just thinking about all the time. I see it constantly and often, when we talk about communities of color where people are poor, we frame them as a deficit. We frame them as a compilation of all the dysfunction in their life. We did a documentary, "Black in America" documentary around a young woman named Glorious Menefee, who was going off to college, and we followed her story. I remember arguing with our producer who used a bit of a shorthand to describe her, Glorious' mother as a crack addict, Glorious' father is an alcoholic. Well, first of all, those are not descriptors of Glorious at all. Those are descriptors of a dysfunctional family. Those things are true, but if you're looking for a description of Glorious, you actually have to go into the details. The way to tell Glorious' story well, better, is to talk about Glorious starting for the lacrosse team, and Glorious as a B student, and Glorious as a peer mentor, and this is who she is, and this is where she lives, and these are her dreams and her goals, and her aspirations. Yes, she has two parents whose struggles have messed up her life in a lot of ways, but knowing all those details, now we care more about Glorious, and we want to see her succeed. At the end of the doc when we see her get into college and burst into tears, and as she says, "Now I can finally get out, " we understand Glorious. She wasn't this shorthand about failure and dysfunction. You don't have any emotional sense of that. I think, detail is what makes a person real and whole, and not just a shorthand version of wink wink, you know what I'm talking about, black girl in her city.
3. Getting Started: The Idea & Support: So, I'll take you through how I think about a story, although I'll caution you for every version there there's a million exceptions to the rule, but this is kind of standard. The very first thing we start with is what's the story. Usually, somebody reaches out and says, "I'm really interested in X.", and that means that you have to go and figure out what is the story generally. Often, we pitch the story. There's something that we're interested in as a company and so we'll go to the partners we work with and say, "Boy, we think there's a really interesting story here. Is this a story you'd be interested in telling?" So, you find a partner and you agree that, yes, there is a story here. We're not really sure what it is, we don't know the details, we don't have any characters yet, we're not sure where we're going to shoot it, we don't know how long it's going to be. We don't even know over what amount of time we'd shoot it. Is it short, is it a medium length, is it a full length doc? But we feel there is a story here and that's usually the very beginning for us. We often start our storytelling with a question that's kind of stymied us like, "Oh, this is weird. I wonder why. Why is college so expensive today? Why has it doubled from when I went 20 years ago, when it doesn't seem like much has really changed beside that? It could just start with a question but often it starts with this idea that we believe there is a story here. We don't know many details that we just think there is a story to be told. Because I run a small business, most of our stories need a partner, either someone who's going to fund it or someone who's going to air it or often those can be the same person. Usually, we come up with a story that we care about and we know who were interested in working with. We have partners and lots of platforms that we deal with. We know this would be a really interesting story for this partner that's interested in this issue. I think sometimes people who don't work in journalism are frustrated. They've got a good story and they'll say, "How come the news won't cover this? They'll only come when it's bad news. They never come for something good." I'm like, "Well, then tell your own story." The great news today is with social media, you can really own the narrative of your own story. You can capture content. Technology is relatively inexpensive and you can tell your own story and create a platform for your stories to live. We had a hard time doing stories about ethnic and racial minorities when you worked for mainstream media organizations or people had a very specific idea of what they wanted and it didn't really match necessarily what the data was telling me or the kinds of stories that I wanted to do. So, sure, yes, there's a lot of times where you feel like you're in a fight to get your stories on somewhere. We did a documentary called Beyond Bravery The Women of Ground Zero. It was a look at women who worked as rescuers during 9/11. We focused on two police officers, two firefighters, one EMT, and one national security expert. Six women who all were on the job on 9/11. When the woman who pitched the story to us, a photographer came to talk to us, I actually didn't believe her. She said, "Women are written out of the history books in terms of 9/11, in terms of being rescuers not just victims." I was like, "I covered 9/11, I disagree. I don't think so." But we started actually looking into the public record and she was right, that most of the stories about women they were victims who had been rescued. Most of the stories about men were men as rescuers. It was always very male-centric. I was completely wrong in what my gut told me and really it was my own bias speaking. I just thought I knew the story well. And it wasn't till we really went to the data that you could see that she was right and I was wrong. We pitched a doc Looking at the Women of Ground Zero, women who worked as rescuers. In our first screening, it was crazy, the number of people who would stand up and say, "So, is your point that women are more brave? I was like, "I mean, no. And I don't even know what that means." Finally, we were able to shut them up when I said, "Do you know how many stories I've done on the dogs of 9/11, like the German shepherds of 9/11? Nobody minds. Why are we so resistant to an hour focusing on women who worked at Ground Zero rescuing people. It's just another point of view on a story that we think we all know." We thought it was appropriate for the anniversary. And I should add, when that documentary aired it won the day partly because it was not a story about the women of ground zero, it was a story about an event we thought we all knew so well from a different perspective. I think, one of the things that I've done over the years is to make sure that we just pluck people out and elevate them and tell those stories that are often ignored. I think that's really, really important. Frankly, if it makes people uncomfortable, so be it. The key is to do it so well that at the end everybody recognizes that you were right and that telling that story was the right thing to do. And that it was a good story, and it was an interesting story, and it is a compelling story. Then, you get a bunch of viewers across all age groups, and races, and ethnicities, and gender, and you win.
4. Preparation: Casting & Research: Once you have a partner, and you have a platform you know that you're going to, you have a basic project and you have someone you're working with, and you have a place where you know it's going to air. Then, you start to actually do the work. You start narrowing down. Okay, who is going to be the voice of this project? What is the point of view? What is the story specifically we're trying to tell? We kind of know the macro but who do we actually talk to? I'll give you a good example. We did a project with a production company called critical content that looked at the killings of Biggie and Tupac. So, first you have an idea of, boy, wouldn't it be interesting to really look at the deaths of Biggie and Tupac, 20 years after their killings? Both of those killings are unsolved. Those are interesting. That's the general idea. Okay. But specifically now, who are we going to talk to? What is the actual story? We knew the the title, we knew the basic gist, but how do we tell that story is kind of the next step. If you're going to do a character driven story, you need a character. We call it casting, which I think is a really unpleasant word because it makes it sound very fake. But casting is not that, it really is just culling through all the people who could be the purveyors of your story. Right? Whose point of view will we use to tell this story? I think you look for things across the board when you're going to cast a story. One, it's television. So, the people need to be good on television not necessarily attractive and the most articulate person in the world, that's not what I mean by good on television. It means, they have to pop, they have to be interesting, they have to make you want to see more of them. So, there's not necessarily a type or a person or, you know, I wouldn't say, "Listen, what you need to find is a person who's five foot high, brown hair, brown eyes." That's always what works. It really is what's internal to the person. What pops about them and how did they tell their own story? At the end of the day, how did they come across on camera? So, the first thing we do is we put people on camera. We just throw them on camera. We ask them some questions, we set up cameras, and we really see how people come across on camera. In addition to how people come across on camera, you need to understand what their backstory is, what are the facts of their story? Do those facts match up to the story that you're trying to tell? We did a documentary about black technologists who were trying to be founders of tech companies for a doc series I did called Black in America. We had eight people in a house and we were going to follow them. One, we put them on camera to see who we'd liked on camera. Then also, what was their backstory? How did they get there? What was the thing that they were developing a technology? How much access would they give us? Were they willing to be honest on camera? You can always tell when people are not, you know, when they're spinning you a little bit. So, in addition to how they come across on camera, you need to be able to get access to them. You need to make sure that you feel like they're being authentic, they're telling you the truth. Then also, their backstory, the facts of their case if you will, the facts of the story, I think are really, really important. So, before you even sit down to interview someone, you just need tons of research, you want to know everything that they've done. At my company, we have a team of people who pull that research. So, you really want to understand their backstory. You want to understand what's happening. You want to understand currently what they're going through. Just the basics, you want to know their their basic path, how do they get to where they are? Some of the things that their friends have said, some of the things that their enemies have said. People who agree with you, people who disagree with you really want to get as much research as possible. I'm a big believer in reading in, I love to have more information. So, I read absolutely every single thing about someone before I interview them. No one's going to sit down with you and just tell you every single thing, you know, warts and all about their life. Your job as the interviewer is to know the back story and to push people on the things that have worked out and the things that have not worked out. That's what's going to make your story dynamic. Listen, at the end of the day, the power and the responsibility is in the hands of the interviewer. It's your job. Everyone's going to pitch a perfect story to you all the time. It does not behoove them to tell you a story with ups and downs. They want it to be a perfect story. It started off great, it was great, it ended great. But really, the reality is, it never does that. It's always a challenge. A good interviewer can figure out how to get to those challenges. One, by knowing them before you even enter the room to interview somebody. Two, by asking questions the right way, so that people will feel comfortable in sharing some of those challenges with you. If you're talking to people about whom a lot is not known, then I would strongly suggest a pre-interview. I would suggest a pre-interview that you don't do. Get somebody else to call in and just say, "Hey we're going to be interviewing you next week. I'd love to ask you some questions". That is usually a couple hour, two hours just sit down. Where were you born? Tell me about your family? Tell me about your life? Every little detail. Because usually, from that pre-interview, you can gather some really interesting data which will be used obviously in questions later. I did an interview with Andrew Young the ambassador to the U.N. in the past who was one of Martin Luther King's best friends. He has told the story of the night Dr. King was assassinated, a million times in the time that since Dr. King was killed. I remember, I sat down with him we did a three hour interview, and I started with, "Tell me about the night Dr. King was killed." He started going through the same story, but partly because we had spoken for probably two hours beforehand. He was kind of less rote. He just was more thoughtful about it. In the middle of our interview, he started to cry. I asked him about how he perceived that and he said, "In all my time, I have never done anything as important as that. " I mean, it was really a remarkable interview for a guy who has told that story a thousand times maybe more, maybe more than a thousand times. We were able to get to the real emotion of that moment in a way I think that other people had not. Some of it was we warm down. We just talked for two hours, right? So after a couple of hours, people can't just keep up a facade, they have to, you know, now you're really talking to them. So, some of it is just to wear people down and that they start having real real answers to your questions. Some of it was, we spent so much time digging into his memories that I think he felt like he was really being forced to call up things from his past and remember them.
5. How to Lead a Great Interview: We as human beings are often very terrible listeners. In fact, when we engage people we don't listen, we just wait to talk next. So, you talk and then I'm like, "Wait, let me wait for my, okay, okay okay. Now my turn to get in." When you report, you have to listen and you have to actively listen, like really listen to what someone is telling you so that you can fair it out the next thing that you want to talk about from their remarks. When I started reporting, I used to be so nervous that someone could literally confess to killing their mother and I would have been like, "Okay, Question three anyway." I mean I didn't even learn to listen. I have a question, I'm going to ask it, I've asked it, I'm moving on, moving on, moving on. I didn't listen to their answer. I was so nervous that I have to fill the time. Then, as you get better at it, you realize that you can go in to a conversation with someone with just one question and fill an hour off of that one question because if you do it right, you should be able to elicit something that brings you to the next interesting question. That's good listening. So, a lot of times, we don't listen because we're nervous or we're just waiting for our opportunity to jump in, but the essence of good storytelling is actually listening. I think the other thing you can do is to let things breathe. When you're interviewing people, the feeling is you don't want to have dead air so you'll jump in right away and really people say the craziest stuff when you just let them talk. So, I think there's a value in challenging people but I think there's also a value in just saying nothing, literally saying nothing, just allowing people with the dead air. "So, how did you feel?" Usually, they'll say," It was fine," and just get comfortable with awkward silences because in the awkward silence, if you don't fill it, often they'll say, "I mean it wasn't fine, it was kind of," and they'll start just babbling about something and I think you start getting to people's true reactions as opposed to just letting them get away with the first answer. So, I think really listening, allowing for dead air, being comfortable with that, just allowing, obviously you can't do that on live television but just allowing people to be uncomfortable is really letting things hang in the air. Someone will say something and says like, "What?" Just say. They'll answer it themselves. They will do their own follow up. Then I think another strategy is to push people to do a follow up. When someone says something that you just feel is utter bullshit, you have to say, "I just don't believe you. I just I'm not believing what you're saying. I don't think you're telling me the truth here." Or some version of that where you push back because I think people who are defensive often give very good interviews. They'll sort of be a little more strident about what they're telling you. A great question is, "But why? Why? What was your biggest challenge? Talk to me about a failure. What did not work? So, was it always great or was there a moment where you thought you were going to quit?" Tell me about the time where you said, "Fuck it, I'm out!" Tell me about why you didn't? What was the thing that made you stay? Who was the person who talked to you off the ledge? What do you hate? Tell me about the worst day ever that you've ever had?" Like all those questions will elicit someone to share some crazy story and by the way, the down point doesn't have to be something even within their company. The downplay can be something in their personal life that made them feel like the juggle was hard. I think the more you can get those emotional and personal touch points, the more that people will feel like, "Gosh! I identify with that. I understand that." Then you see that their climb from this to this that's where heroism is built, I think. The classic thing to not do is don't ever ask "yes or no" questions because people will always answer yes or no, unless you're going to set up a follow up for them. The most annoying thing in the world is to listen to the White House correspondents ask "yes or no" questions of the president. That is really stupid. You need to ask questions where you elicit an answer, not a yes or no. Some interviews are going to be interviews or confessional, where people are going to tell you their story. You need to be prepared for that, and really think about how you're going to draw out their story and make sure that you stay on track, you don't get distracted by so much emotion that you actually forget that you need this and this and this and this out of your interview. You need to go in knowing, I need from this interview, the story of this person's relationship with their father because that's what the story is about. So, they can tell me all the backstory and they tell me all this other stuff. At the end of the day, this is a story about their relationship with their dad. So, we need to make sure we're really listening for what we need in this story and you don't get distracted by other stuff. I think you have to both know the beats that you trying to get. What am I trying? What is this interview about? What are we trying to get? What are the things that I need to walk home with? But also, leave enough time and enough space in the interview to be surprised. Some interviews are confrontational, you should be prepared for that. If you're going to confront someone and there's a good chance they're going to walk away, it's good to think about your strategy for that interview. Even an interview that feels like it's going badly, it's not necessarily going badly if it's a taped or recorded interview. Sometimes it's just the content that you need. You can be feuding with someone which might feel very uncomfortable but the interview might actually be really good. We were interviewing Suge Knight the other day for this Biggie and Tupac special, and he was telling me that he's never done anything illegal in his whole life. I did not believe him and I told him that since we were talking to him from jail. But the moment is very interesting even though I think he was not being very honest. So, if you're having a confrontational interview, unless for some reason you really want to fight with someone on camera, I think it's nice to bring the temperature down and really have a very chill conversation with them. A girlfriend of mine who's been a great mentor of mine used to say it all the time as, "Unconfuse me," is a great way to frame your thinking. So, "Unconfuse me. If you've been arguing against this, why would you accept money for such and such?" I think framed as an "unconfuse me", it doesn't feel as like an attack, it feels like I'm just confused, I need you to unconfuse me. Katy Kirk is the queen of the "Unconfuse me" interview. "So, Senator," and you hear her say, "Unconfuse me. Tell me why you would blah blah blah blah." It's very pleasant, and it's very appropriate, and it doesn't feel like an attack.
6. Crafting Your Structure: The very first thing that I do after an interview is to get the logs of the interview. I want a stack of transcripts of every word that every single person that I interviewed said, and I want it with the time code, so I know exactly what they said and how long it took for them to say it. Transcripts are extremely helpful because they really lay out verbatim, what was said. They help in how you're going to think about writing and telling your story because, obviously, my memory is not perfect even for interviews that I've done. Also, I think as you start doing your rough draft, you can plunk in those chunks to make sure that your story is flowing in a way that makes sense. From that then you get your B-roll, what are the stories, how do you connect those chunks of interview so that you actually have an interesting and compelling story. If you're doing a documentary, often you'll gather interviews and just sit there and think about that interview and where that takes you next. As we were doing our Biggie and Tupac story, we would finish an interview and think, this person is really pointing us to talk to somebody else, and we would go and book that next interview. So, it really depends on the kind of story that you're telling, and frankly, the time pressure you're under. I also think you want to start with, again, depending on what kind of story you're telling, where you start that storytelling. Not everybody's story needs to begin, they were born in New Jersey in 1967. Often for me, the most interesting way to get into a story is to jump into the story, to be in the middle of it. So, if you're trying to tell a corporate story about the starting of a company, I think it's really, really boring to tell the story of the birth of the founder. I think you can get to that, but I think I want to be in the middle of what's happening in their company today, what's exciting, what's interesting, why do they matter. Tell me what's happening this moment. We start with something exciting and crazy, and they're running down the halls and this is happening, right? Then we back into, it was all an idea just 10 years ago, right? That's far more interesting than a linear progression. You might have great stuff, it might just not fit into the story you're trying to tell. So, you circle things that are a great fit. You have to remember to have an honest editor who's helping you say, that's a really great story, does not fit into this thing we're doing over here. I think knowing the story that you're trying to tell is a very helpful guide for keeping even really great material out. Now, you might get to an interview, when you thought the guy was going to say something else, and yet you actually have a different story than the story you're trying to tell. Which means you have to scrap the story you're trying to tell and you have to tell a new story. So, that would be an exception to that rule. So, if you're working for a large corporation, that large corporation spends lots of money already advertising their corporation. They're spending it in marketing, they're spending it in advertising, they're spending it every time they go out into the community. So, I would say think about all of those things as distribution, those are all opportunities to distribute your story. Before you even begin, you really need to be thinking about distribution. If something's going to live on social media, then creating a 90 minute documentary is going to be a complete waste of your time, it's not going to work. If you are creating something to be distributed at a children's museum and you have profanity in it, it's never going to work. You have to know what you're creating before you even think about. You have to know who you're creating the content for, or have a good idea before you even get to the creation of it, I think that makes it a little more efficient. I think if you're a small business owner, same thing. I think if you're trying to tell your own corporate story, or your own business story, or your own entrepreneurial story, you have to think about who do you want to see the story, who's your audience? At the end of the day, advertising and marketing and even social media is telling your story to an audience, so who are you trying to reach? Is it founders? Is it policymakers? Is it a general audience? Is it young people? Is it older people? Every single platform has its demographics, and once you know those demographics, you can say, "This is very important for my story to be on here because these are the kind of people we're going to be reaching."
7. Closing: So, I think for someone who's not a journalist or a writer who's going to be on the receiving end who's going to be interviewed about their company, I think these are all really good things to know. I think you want to be interviewed, I think you want to practice being interviewed, and I think you want to think about what is that authentic story to tell. Coming up with candid answers will not make for a great interview for your company or for your organization. Not understanding the why of why you created something is problematic. You should be able to answer questions. You should be able to really dig down and tell stories about where you messed up, and what you've done well, and what your hopes and dreams are. You should be able to connect emotionally with people who are interviewing you. That's going to make for a better story. So, I think people who are on the other side who are being interviewed really need to figure out what their story is. The way to do that is to have other people help them figure that out. I remember when I was learning how to report, it was not very good. I was actually very terrible. I remember telling my dad how much I was messing up and he said to me, "You know, when you were little, I remember you getting on a bike and you just couldn't get it and you couldn't get it, but you never gave up. You just kept getting back on that bike. You know you've always been a very tenacious person. You just never give up." He helped craft in my head, this story of a person who is not only tenacious but has been tenacious her whole life. In fact, the story of my life is that no matter who's knocking me off the bike, I am going to figure it out and I'm going to make it work. I think that helped build a narrative that is what I think is true to me, which is the story of who I am as a person. I think you can have other people help you develop what is your story, what is your narrative, because you can tell that story as you're being interviewed from what other people have told you. I think if you get a lot of people who come up with something that doesn't fit with your narrative, you really need to rethink your narrative. So first, thanks so much for taking this class. I hope that you think about all the different ways that stories are told. I think if you're going to interview people, there's really some basics which are listen, listen, listen, and then listen some more, and then really think strategically about the story that you're trying to tell. It's a really great skill to have. There's nobody who can't grow in value by learning how to do a good interview and learning how to tell a good story. It's important for everybody, whether you're a journalist or you're just someone who's trying to tell their own story. I think it's really essential.
8. What's Next?:
Soledad O'Brien, CEO Starfish Media Group
