“This isn’t going to be on TV, is it?”

I can’t count the number of times I heard that question from someone I was about to interview — even though I was holding my clearly branded TV news microphone up to their face and my photojournalist colleague was pointing a professional-quality video camera lens at them. Sometimes I felt like saying, “Um, yeah. What else would we be doing here?” (But I didn’t.)

It speaks to some people’s deep-seated, all-encompassing fear of speaking in front of the camera (or a webcam or a podcast microphone). I’m here to tell you: you can do it — even if you don’t think you can at first. As a former broadcast news anchor and reporter with two decades of experience, I’ve got some thoughts on how to make that dreaded on-cam interview easier for yourself.