What Makes a Great Interview Subject (It's Not Being Famous)

People often assume we chase famous names. We don't, or at least not for the reason they think. Fame is occasionally useful and frequently overrated, and some of the most-read pieces we've ever produced featured people you've never heard of. When our editors decide who to approach, we're looking for something quite different from a follower count. This is an attempt to describe what that something is — partly so prospective subjects understand why we reached out, and partly to reassure the many excellent experts who assume they're "not a big enough deal" to be worth interviewing.

Depth beats reach

The first thing we look for is genuine depth in a subject. Not a broad, shallow familiarity with a trendy topic, but the deep knowledge that comes from actually doing the work for years. A researcher who has lived inside one problem, an engineer who has shipped the hard thing three times, an operator who has seen a specific situation from every angle — that person has texture and detail that no amount of visibility can substitute for.

Depth is what produces the surprising, quotable, true observations that make a piece worth reading. Reach just determines how many people could read it. We'd rather have the depth and find the reach ourselves through syndication.

Depth is what produces the observations worth reading. Reach just determines how many people could read them. Sophie Bergström

Something specific to say

A great subject has a point — a particular argument, an unusual angle, a piece of hard-won wisdom that isn't the conventional take. We're wary of subjects whose entire message is "my thing is good and growing." That's an advertisement, not a story. We're drawn to people who'll say something a little uncomfortable, a little against the grain, backed by real experience.

You don't need to be a contrarian for its own sake. You just need to have thought hard enough about your field to have a view that isn't the default one.

Willingness to be honest

The best subjects are honest about difficulty, uncertainty, and failure. As my colleague Daniel put it in his companion piece, the goal is to sound like a person, not a press release. We can tell within a few minutes whether someone is going to give us candour or a sales pitch, and candour makes for a far better story — and, frankly, a far better subject to work with.

Honesty also builds the trust that the whole process depends on. A subject who's straight with us is easy to represent fairly, and the resulting piece tends to make them look good precisely because it's credible.

Curiosity about the conversation itself

Some of my favourite subjects treat the interview as a chance to think out loud rather than a chore to get through. They get interested in a question, chase it somewhere unexpected, and end up articulating something they hadn't quite put into words before. Those moments — where the subject discovers something mid-sentence — are pure gold, and they only happen when someone is genuinely engaged rather than reciting talking points.

Why fame is often a distraction

Let me push harder on the fame question, because it trips up so many good people in both directions. On one side, prospective subjects count themselves out — "I only have a few thousand followers, why would anyone want to talk to me?" On the other, genuinely famous people sometimes assume their name alone makes them interesting, and coast. Both are misreading what a story needs.

A large platform is, at best, orthogonal to whether someone is worth interviewing. It can even work against a piece: the very-online expert has often said everything they think a hundred times already, in polished, pre-packaged form, and getting them to say something fresh is like pulling teeth. Meanwhile the postdoc who has never given an interview arrives with a head full of unexpressed, precise, hard-won observations — and those make the reader sit up. When I weigh a potential subject, follower count doesn't enter the calculation. What enters is: does this person know something real, and will they say it plainly?

The reach part is our problem to solve, not yours. That's the entire point of a syndication newsroom. You bring the depth; we bring the distribution. Worrying that you're "not big enough" is worrying about the one thing we're specifically built to handle.

A quiet note on nerves

One more thing, because it comes up constantly: being a great subject has nothing to do with being confident or media-trained. Some of the most compelling people I've worked with were visibly nervous, apologized for rambling, and were certain they'd done badly — and produced transcripts full of brilliant, quotable material. Nerves are not a disqualifier. Often they travel with exactly the kind of thoughtful, self-questioning mind that makes for a great interview. If that's you, don't let it stop you.

What we explicitly don't require

Let me be direct about the things people worry about that don't actually matter to us:

• You don't need to be famous. A large audience is not a prerequisite. Substance is.
• You don't need to be senior. A postdoc who understands one thing deeply can be a better subject than a CEO who understands everything vaguely.
• You don't need to be a polished speaker. That's what interviewing and editing are for. We can draw out and shape your ideas; we can't manufacture ideas you don't have.
• You don't need a "news hook." Sometimes the most interesting story is simply a deep explanation of something evergreen and important.

The subjects who surprise us

If I had to name the pattern behind our best pieces, it would be this: the subject undersold themselves at the start. They came in apologetic — "I'm not sure I'm the right person," "I don't really do interviews," "my work is probably too niche to be interesting" — and then proceeded to say three things in the first twenty minutes that stopped me cold. That combination of genuine depth and genuine modesty is almost a signature of a great subject, because the modesty usually means they've been too busy doing the work to inflate it.

The inverse pattern is worth naming too, gently. The people who arrive certain they're fascinating, with a polished narrative and a list of achievements, are often the hardest to make interesting — not because they lack substance, but because they've wrapped the substance in so much presentation that getting to the real thing takes the whole conversation. If you recognize yourself in the first group rather than the second, that's a good sign, not a disqualification.

Why we're telling you this

Two reasons. First, if we've reached out to you, this is roughly why — you have depth, a point of view, or a story with real texture, and we noticed. It isn't random, and it isn't a mass mailing. Second, if we haven't reached out and you're reading this thinking "I have exactly that kind of depth, but I'd never have called myself important enough" — that's precisely the person we most want to hear from. The experts who assume they're not worth interviewing are frequently the ones who are.

If that's you, you don't have to wait for us to find you. You can put yourself forward, tell us what you know deeply, and let our editors be the judge of whether there's a story. More often than you'd expect, there is.