Press Gazette - 10 January 2008

Website aims to aggregate 'every interview since 1859'

By Dominic Ponsford

Celebrity interviewer Rob McGibbon has launched a website business which aims to provide a comprehensive index of journalistic interviews.

McGibbon, a freelance who has previously written celebrity interviews for Press Gazette, launched the aggregation website AccessInterviews.com last week.

He told Press Gazette he wants Access Interviews to become the definitive index to the world’s past and present interviews available on the web, and to serve as a promotional tool for publishers with exclusive interviews to attract new readers to their websites or print editions.

The website will also work as a rolling research archive for general users, PRs and journalists, and is also intended to provide a way for writers to collate their own portfolio of work.

McGibbon’s website does not carry its own content and is operated on an open editorial basis providing links back to the websites of newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and those of individual interviewers.

McGibbon has self-financed the venture after developing it for two years with website designers Mettic.

Access Interviews will be free to use and run on an advertising-funded model, although sponsorship is already lined up for specific elements of the site.

McGibbon hopes that Access Interviews will grow to become a global hub through which all interviews can be freely and independently sourced.

He said: “Interviews are a vital selling component for every media platform and this website provides a unique gateway to project that content beyond the confines of a magazine cover or news pages.

“Also, more interviews are appearing online as magazines and newspapers open up their archives. By generating the links to this content on an independent site such Access Interviews, publishers will attract new premium web traffic deep into their sites.

“I think this will have particular appeal to magazines that get amazing celebrity access but have modest print circulations and low web traffic.

“Journalists and web editors hold the keys to the archives, so I appeal to them to get digging and post the links.

“It has been a long – and expensive – struggle to develop Access Interviews but we have created what I think is a slick and sophisticated site with a huge capacity. My ambition is to archive every interview since the genre began in 1859.”

Access Interviews will also feature McGibbon conducting in-depth filmed interviews with celebrities and leading media figures.

First up is Andy McNab, followed by Andrew Neil and Felix Dennis. He promises that no questions will go “unasked”.