So who's qualified to interview people these days, there was a time when the rules were very set, you had to be an accredited journalist from a big newspaper, a major TV network or TV station. And you had your press pass, and those are the people who got to interview people will, the days of that are long gone. And these days, anyone's a journalist. Anyone with a cell phone, who captures police arresting someone in an inappropriate way is now a journalist with a much larger audience than full time journalists who were 20 years ago. Anyone with a blog as a journalist. Now, I don't mean that in the sense that everyone's filled with ethics and does everything in a factually correct way all the time.

But I do mean, with modern social media, anyone can commit acts of journalism in the sense of interviewing people trying to find new things. Information about new ideas and presenting it to the larger world either through their blog, their website, their YouTube channel, through submitting it to Huffington Post other websites that allow consumers to put their user generated content. So regardless of where you are in the spectrum of, you know, serious full time journalist who went to the Columbia Journalism School, got a Master's, and is worked at the New York Times and now NBC versus a 10 year old, who has a blog on stamp collecting, and now wants to interview the local head of the stamp collecting club and his or her small town. That person's a journalist to these days, either one is in a situation to interview. Really anyone who wants to know information and create content on a subject matter these days as a journalist sense and therefore can have a need and a want to interview people.

So if you're going to interview people, and the one hand, yeah, it's just a conversation, you're just having a conversation. On the other hand, it's a little more structured than just a rambling conversation, you do need to plan, you do need some preparation, you do need a sense of how to keep things along how to begin things, how to pull out the right amount, and how to end things, especially when you're doing it on video. So that's what I want you to think about. And I'm glad that you're interested in this. And I also want you to really, you can't let anyone tell you you're not qualified to interview someone. Now, if you're trying to interview the President of the United States, sure, someone could say you don't have press credentials to get into the White House.

But short of that, if you're demonstrating a particular interest in an area and you're already creating content and you already have an audience in a particular subject matter. I know a lot of people who will do interviews with you. Let's say, for example, you've been doing legal blogging for six months, and you now want to do interviews to have a video component. Well, it's quite likely, you could get Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School or other prominent legal scholars all over the country to take a phone call and you interview them over the phone, or if you're happen to be at their law school, to interview them outside of class for five minutes, if you reproach them the right way, and show them you already have a community of people who care about their ideas and the concerns that they deal with on a regular basis.

So anybody in a sense is qualified to interview anyone else these days. If they seem legitimate, if they seem worthwhile, and especially if they have an audience of interest. To the person who you're asking to interview