Member-only story
Forge Guide to Public Speaking
Video Chat Is the New Public Speaking
But you get to control the lighting
This story is part of How to Get Better at Public Speaking, the Forge guide to talking in front of a crowd.
Early in my career, I invited Nora Ephron, whom I had worked with, to Skype in to a panel I was coordinating. She politely declined, but her reasoning always stuck with me: “I’m too old to Skype. Lighting is everything.”
I don’t actually believe she was too old to Skype — she was Nora Ephron! A legend — but she wasn’t wrong about the lighting. At the turn of the last decade, when our conversation took place, it was invariably terrible for home video-chat dial-ins.
I remembered her comment about a year later, when I was doing a CNN segment via Skype from a random startup office, with nice big windows. The lighting was great. But I couldn’t hear very well, and so even though I was wearing earphones, I kept on moving closer to the screen, resulting in my face smooshing way up close in the little box allotted to me, I looked ridiculous next to the other appropriately framed panelists.
Then there was the time I was offered a segment on CBC while home alone with my baby daughter. I let them know the only way to keep her quiet was to nurse her…
