I went to meet Alex Haigh at his work with my Zoom H4n.
The interview went pretty well, however, I wasn’t as satisfied with it as I was hoping. I was quite nervous and became my inarticulate self a little bit. Despite this the interview seemed to flow relatively well.
I think the problem of the campaign being 18 months old made it difficult because he had almost left the campaign alone for the past 6 months. Alex had interesting information about how other countries received the Stop Phubbing campaign and I enjoyed hearing about how it all came about by advertising for Macquarie dictionaries.
In hindsight, I probably could have found a better topic but I still think the interview was interesting.
I figured it would work well as a general interest topic and even though the campaign turned out to be 18 months old, it is still very relevant to todays society as technology is constantly advancing and becoming more intrusive in social situations.
I organised an interview with Alex Haigh, the face of the campaign.
I was hoping to get a more insight into the campaign and see how it has progressed in the past 18 months. As it hasn’t had any media coverage for almost a year I was hoping there would be a new perspective to be found.
The aim was for the listener to be aware of the campaign and the message it was trying to get across, even if that is they just feel a bit more self-conscious the next time they keep using their phone in a social situation.
I did my research on the campaign and realised that they had a few interesting things on their website (that you can’t access on your phone, only a computer!), such as phubbing interventions, wedding placecards and a hall of shame. The other cool fact I discovered was that Coca-Cola picked up the campaign too. This video below was released by Coke called ‘Stop Phubbing around’.
After doing my research the main questions I wanted to ask where:
1. Wikipedia claims the campaign got picked up in the UK, Mexico and Germany, why do you think the campaign did so well in these countries?
2. When did the campaign move away from selling dictionaries and become a social movement?
3. The phrase was created out of a technology based problem and is used in a dictionary campaign, but does the physical dictionary really have a much of a role in society anymore given it’s easier to google a definition then wait until you get home and pull out your dictionary?
From here I (had back-up questions) but was hoping to establish some sort of flow into the campaign or the evolution of language.
The initial talk about the interview made me feel a bit worried as I’m not overly confident in my interviewing technique. I find I can come off a bit stunted just because of nerves, something that I always struggle with. I was never a great public speaker and I can become very inarticulate when I get nervous.
I have had a listen to RRR and I was really hoping that it would spark some sort of inspiration for a interview topic, but unfortunately it didn’t quite happen for me. I enjoyed listening to the station and getting a feel of what goes to air, however, I listened to the Breakfasters and there was a lot of political segments and interviews. I think that was because the budget had just been released. So I was struggling to come up with a suitable topic and interviewee for my own interview.
The ideas I brought up in class were:
1. Recent thoughts about volunteering overseas as a few articles have come up presenting organisations that send people overseas to volunteer in developing communities as somewhat of a scam. The articles look at how, especially in orphanages, having volunteers going over all the time creates a very unstable environment. This doesn’t necessarily do the kids any good at all with people coming and going regularly and can be utilised as a bit of a opportunity for travellers. The major problem I had with this idea is who I could interview, I highly doubt that going directly to a organisation such as this would work.
2. The question of where money goes to when people donate to charities. A high risk of donating to some charities is that only a small percentage of the money goes to the actual cause the rest gets lost in transactions and admin costs. Once again, the question of who to interview created a struggle.
3. My final idea was about the impact that modern technology is having on eating out. Restaurants have been complaining that with the surge in people wanting to post up pictures of their food or coffee on Instragram or Facebook it is taking a much longer time to serve customers. By the time people check in on Facebook to where they are and who they are with (and reply to any text messages), it’s at least 5 minutes before they get around talking to who they’ve come with and then even longer to look at the menu. Then once the food as arrived they take photos and post that up to Instragram – all while the food is getting cold, meaning they are then less satisfied with their meal and the turn around in busy restaurants is much longer.
The final idea seemed to spark the most amount of interest and Bec suggested a friend of hers that was the face of the Stop Phubbing Campaign so I decided to land on that.
I throughly enjoyed our second class at the RRR station. It was great to get a tour of the station and studios. Walking around made me realise what a fantastic opportunity this class was providing us with.
We met Elizabeth and Archie and got a feel of the environment. Elizabeth’s run down of what was expected was useful to get a better understanding of what was ahead. The biggest point she made for me was that RRR presents things from a scientific perspective. These strong details of the station made me feel somewhat nervous as it is a much stricter environment than I was conditioned to previously on radio.
Archie ran over the panels and operating systems. The most daunting part of that is the computer 2 system that holds what sponsorship announcements we had to play and our RWAV themes. I’ve never used a system like that before so that might take some practise to get used to.
I’m looking forward to going back in and booking some studio time to refresh my memory – it’s been a year since I presented on air and used a panel.
I am really looking forward to getting back into radio and learning about the station.