The Independent - 17 March 2008

If content is king, the interview must be his crown

Journalist Rob McGibbon has set up a treasure trove of celebrity press interviews which he hopes will realise his dream of making a fortune from the internet.

In this dizzy digital age journalists are becoming hardened to seeing their sacred art forms hijacked by any chancer with a computer. News and sports coverage have been transformed by Google News and its countless imitations, not to mention legions of have-a-go citizen journalists; comment, previously the preserve of pious editorial writers and lofty columnists, has been substantially muffled by the shouting match between a billion bloggers; even critics are being marginalised by armies of amateur scribes happy to impart their views.

But one element of journalism has shown itself to be integral to the traditional media bundle on all its platforms and yet resistant to cavalier impersonation: the interview.

If content is king, then the interview is the bejewelled crown and its value has never been higher. When every news item and issue worthy of comment has been exhausted to death by the world and its websites by 9am, then what price do you put on a revealing and exclusive conversation with a leading politician or household celebrity that will then set the agenda for others to follow?

Just look at any magazine or supplement cover, newspaper page one blurb or TV bulletin and you can see that a big interview is still the consistent, fail-safe draw. Is it any wonder when you consider just how much knock-on interest and news stories are generated from a single, blindingly good interview?

The interview cannot be easily unbundled because it relies upon a precious, ephemeral ingredient that, thankfully, acts as a barrier to entry to the amateurs: ACCESS. Without that, there is nothing.

Access is only achieved through years of sweat developing contacts and trust, which in turn are only gained with a proven track record of delivering the goods. You can't just boot up a blog, grab a digital Dictaphone, then turn up at Claridges to shoot the shit with Jack Nicholson, or go to No 10 to un-spin Gordon Brown. Get in line. And that line is long and fiercely guarded.

I have been interviewing for 20 years and have the cassettes to prove it. More than two years ago I had the idea of launching a website, Access Interviews.com, dedicated to indexing and promoting interviews and the interviewers.

The idea came some time between Richard Branson stammering down the line to me from Necker in the British Virgin Islands and listening to the mind-numbing, jet-lagged inanities of the pop star Gwen Stefani. I did scores of other interviews during the time I developed the initial idea into what is now a complex, yet simple to use, website that aggregates links to the latest interviews available online. I will spare you the pain of the intervening cash-draining months of exasperation.

Access Interviews doesn't carry content, but instead it provides a platform for publishers, broadcasters and individual writers, to link their exclusives and attract a new audience to their websites, or hard copy. How useful is a global billboard such as this to a small circulation magazine with a valuable high-access interview to promote when its only publicity route in the past has been fighting for air on a choking rack, or leaking a story to newspapers with fingers-crossed for a name-check?

If you have an exclusive interview, load the link and Access Interviews automatically organises your ever-growing portfolio of work. Equally, it is becoming a reliable research tool for all users. Anyone who has tried searching for genuine interviews via Google or certain, over-priced hit-and-miss online libraries, will quickly see the benefits of a finely filtered system.

I have just finished my duties as a judge on the Interviewer of the Year category for the British Press Awards. There were 38 writers on the long-list. When you see a distilled package of UK's best newspaper interviewers, you can easily appreciate the skill and sheer hard graft of these writers. Often, interviewers such as this group get great exclusives which are ripped off and re-packaged by all and sundry across the internet.

With Access Interviews, the writers and their newspapers get recognised for their scoop. With the escalation in digital mimicry, surely it is vital to have an independent resource that respects copyright?

There is also an element of the Long Tail effect in indexing interviews. Traditionally, only the most credible magazines and trusted newspapers get genuine access for the big interviews, regardless of their miniscule circulations. Now, those titles and their prized interviewers have a global reach.

For example, I had never read an interview in Canada's Financial Post until it linked its big, pre-incarceration talk with Conrad Black to Access Interviews. Thousands of newspapers lifted quotes from that article without even crediting the source – but only the original piece lives on our website. The same is true when Newsweek got a major exclusive with Barack Obama recently and loaded the link. I would never have read it there, unless that simple route had been opened up. When I had the embryonic idea that would eventually mutate into Access Interviews, I needed expert advice. So, I did what every self-respecting journalist would do: I blagged an interview with the best-placed person to help.

It took five months to set up, but eventually I sat across a small white table from Nikesh Arora, the President of Google Europe and beyond. If you're gonna blag, blag big.

During the interview, with his corporate PR Rachel Whetstone sitting beside me, I requested the chance to pitch an idea. It took some chutzpah, but Arora graciously listened as I quickly outlined my cosmic plan in a few sentences.

It was like a pitching scene from The Player. Hilarious, looking back now. But my dream of circumnavigating the hardship that goes with creating a major website by flogging the idea for a few billion of Google dollars was just that, a dream. My idea – in its hollow form then – was not "scaleable" for Google, said the big chief.

But the ensuing interview with Arora produced many pearls of wisdom that helped me create Access Interviews. I was like a wide-eyed follower, breathing in the smoke as a mysterious shaman dispensed life-changing wisdom over blessed burning twigs. Now, the two questions you are all probably silently screaming as you scan these words are: How much did this site cost?

And how the hell is he going to make any money out of it?

I have financed it all myself and, so far, I am in for a medium-end five-figure sum and rising. It's a big website and they are expensive to build and run, but when you consider the scale and reach of such a media project, it is cheap.

Certainly, it will hurt a freelance like me if that cash turns to digital dust. I could end up having to write loads of interviews to recover – God forbid – but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Cue Rocky music.

As for making money: advertising is the obvious model as traffic grows, but I am more focused on attracting key brand endorsements for each of the interview categories, such as a major record label, or even iTunes, for the Music section; a movie studio or latest release for Films; a leading television company for TV and how about a little player for Sport like, er, Nike. Any takers for the Media category?

Rob McGibbon is a freelance journalist and the founder of www.accessinterviews.com