Interview with Lauren Yeates

Last month, I had the opportunity to interview Lauren Yeates, an entertainment reporter, celebrity interviewer and founder of the entertainment news website and podcast Rave It Up. We had a chat about many things including how she got started in journalism and the media industry, some of the celebrities she has interviewed, the Rave It Up podcast and the book she has written. Have a read of the interview here.

 

Photo: Lauren Yeates

What attracted you to Journalism?

Journalism wasn’t something I really wanted to do. I just loved entertainment and it was after I did an interview with Justice Crew, I realised I loved interviewing. Before that, I never thought of interviewing at all. It was after Justice Crew that I had a light bulb moment and was like, I love doing this! I love having that up close and personal time with these celebrities and get to ask the questions I want to know the answers to which a lot of other people as fans want to know as well. Also, because I started so young, it was good to have a young interviewer and have the point of view of the fans and what they want to know so that’s why I was like, I not only need to do this for me, I need to do this for all the fans. That’s when I started thinking about journalism. 

Where did you study journalism?

I remember at one of those school expos that our school was holding, Macleay College was the one that stood out amongst all of them because of how practical it was, and I could be in front of the camera and get my skills honed.

Justice Crew were the first people you interviewed. Who was your next interview with and what was that experience like?

My second interview was with Taz from Justice Crew but he had left by that time. My first two interviews were with Justice Crew so I hold them dear to my heart because it was such a huge memory of my life. That’s where I started. When I watch it now, I cringe. I’m like, it’s no bad, but was very proud of myself because I was only 16 and I was proud that I did it. When I was younger, I was the shyest person you would ever meet. There’s no way in the world I would have ever done that, so it was such a big step for me. Also, I was so starstruck by celebrities I couldn’t say anything so to be able to put that starstruck feeling away and do a job and ask my questions. I think I did a good job.

Could you tell me about the blog you had about Justin Bieber in the beginning?

He was the second big celebrity I met. At that time, he was taking over the world. It was 2010 and I had just started that website for fun, just to write about Justin Bieber and as a fan, it was good way to connect with other fans. We all loved the same person so I made some good friends out of that but it was also a good starting point to what Rave It Up has become now. I learned how to build a website. It was only a blog. Rave It Up was taking it to the next level because it sounds more professional. They’re proper articles. The blog was just me fangirling over Justin Bieber and I was one of ten girls in Australia to have a one-on-one meet and greet with him. I did get a lot of bullying out of it because people were like, “it’s just a fan site” and it was weird to other people, but I got a day off school and got to meet the guy. I got two albums signed. We were only allowed to get one thing signed but because I had the fan site, I ended up sneaking another one in for a fan to win which everyone loved! When I think back on those days, it was the starting point of everything, and it was the reason Rave It Up was born because I wanted to write about other celebrities, instead of just one.

How did you come up with the name Rave It Up for your website?

I can’t take the credit for that. My mum came up with it. She has always been my momager, you know, like Kris Jenner? She came up with that because we were kind of tossing up with some ideas and she always says, “we’ll sleep on it” and usually her best ideas come when she sleeps on it and the next day, she comes up with that great idea. She said, “you know when you’re talking to someone and you’re promoting something or talking about something that you love and are passionate about which are what the interviews are all about, you’re raving about it. That’s how Rave It Up came about. It’s a name that stands out and people remember.

Before you had the podcast, you had a radio show. How did that opportunity come up for you?

Back then, I had not thought about radio at all. But everything happens for a reason. When I look back on my career, there are things I had never even thought of as a possibility or as something I would be interested in. I have to thank Justice Crew really for that because I was a fan of theirs. They were on the Stefan and Heinrich show on SWR 99.9 FM several times and they had their girlfriends on the show, so I had to listen to it. The girls were giving away signed t-shirts or something, so I called up to win it and unfortunately, I didn’t but that’s alright. I was really intrigued because Stefan was around my age, he’s got this successful show with amazing guests on and it was an entertaining show. I kind of just wanted to be able to go and have a look in there and see what radio is all about. I asked him off air if he had any sort of work experience or internships I could do and he called me back the next day and said there’s no proper program we can put you through but you can just come in next week and have a look and we’ll see where we can go from there. I came in and impressed him so much that after that first show, he asked if I wanted to come back next week. I just kept going back in every week and ended up turning into his assistant. I would update the social media during the show, sometimes you would hear me in the background if they were talking to me and eventually, they wanted to bring me on. Fans were always messaging me during the show and asking Stefan to bring me on so that’s when it turned into the Stefan, Heinrich and Lauren show. After Heinrich left to focus on his studies and sports, it was the Stefan and Lauren show and then Stefan moved on so I applied and got my own show.

 

What’s the difference between a radio show and a podcast?

Well, for one thing, my specific podcast is pre-recorded, it’s not live. Even though I pre-recorded most of the radio show I was always there every night, talking in between the interviews, introducing the music, and doing the intros and outros. With the podcast, I have more control over the end product. The main reason I actually finished radio after nine years was because I noticed my audience weren’t really listening to the radio anymore. Unfortunately, radio is slowly dying. it probably will always be around but in terms of keeping up with the times and most of my audience being younger, they’re listening on their phones. I wanted to make sure I was keeping up with that and I noticed that when I would record the radio show and put the recording up on the website so people could listen if they couldn’t tune in live, a lot more people were listening to that recording than they were live and it just got me thinking “when I’m in the studio, what am I even here for? I could just be doing this from home.” That’s another bonus. I love recording it from home and just going out to do the interviews. For the last year or two it’s mostly been zoom interviews right here in this room but I’m getting so much more done in terms of the business side of things because I’m not spending time travelling to the studio or to interviews. I still love in-person interviews. There’s nothing like it and last year when COVID settled down, I got to do a few in-person interviews and was like, “oh my goodness, I’ve missed this!” At the moment, I’m loving the pre-recorded aspect and I love having my own product that I can create the way I want. In commercial radio, someone usually tells you what to do. I’m proud of everything I have put up.

 

How do you choose the people you have on your podcast?

It’s always helpful when I know who the person is and I like them, but I have also interviewed a lot of people that I had never heard of before. On a daily basis, I get emailed a lot of press releases from people promoting new music and movies and I cannot go through them all. I need an assistant to go through them. There’s only one me. I can do all the interviews but I don’t want to be a daily podcast or do a couple of interviews a week. I do like doing the once-a-week thing but that also comes with a price because you could have heaps pre-recorded but you’d be telling people, “Unfortunately your interview is not going to be played for another two months because other people are before you” so it’s a bit annoying that way. In terms of my criteria for choosing people though, I don’t really have a proper criteria, but there is one thing I think about for each person I want to interview or who comes forward and asks to be interviewed and that is, “what is their story? Is it going to be really interesting? What can other people get out of this?” This show has always been about dreams, passions, goals. It’s a very positive show and that’s why I want to find someone with a good story that someone else can relate to. With musicians, maybe an up-and-coming singer, I’ll have them on if their music suits our audience and it’s the type that we usually promote.

 

You have done so many interviews with different people over the last eleven years. Is there one that stands out as a favourite?

I always say I don’t have a favourite. I have a top five which includes Todd McKenney, illusionist Cosentino, Shannon Noll, Bryce Johnson from Pretty Little Liars and Graham Wardle from the show Heartland. The reason I loved the one with Consentino so much was because of how similar we were and how hard we both have worked and just his story of never giving up and working really hard. With Shannon Noll, people had a pre-conceived idea of him because of the media reporting about him yelling at people, drinking and getting arrested so it was good to get the truth out of that.

 

Have you ever had a negative experience with a guest or any of your interviews?

I’ve had plenty of nightmares of that happening in my radio days, like I would mess it up, there would be dead air, or I wouldn’t be there on time, and the show would be over. I’m such a perfectionist but I haven’t really had a bad experience. One I have talked about is with Adam Sevani from Step Up. I had interviewed him over the phone first and you know, they say you shouldn’t want to meet your idol, don’t get your hopes up because they won’t meet your expectations. I’m not saying he was my idol, but I watched all of the Step Up movies and I love him so when I got that interview I was so excited. That was one example where it did not meet my expectations at all. I was so disappointed but I was proud of myself for how I handled it. If you listen to the interview, it was over the phone and it’s already hard enough because you’ve got some delay but also, he just sounded like he’d had a bad day, he was so monotoned. Even for me as an interviewer, it was boring, so the audience is going to be bored but I

was like, no Lauren, you do what you have to do. Make it sound professional and do your job correctly and it’s all on him. Later on, I found out that Adam hates interviews, that’s a big reason why he comes in with that negative attitude. He’s in my book and I had to get everyone’s permission to be in the book so I had contacted his publicist in America again several years later, and he told me that he was going to be in Sydney next week. He asked me if I wanted to do another interview with him in person and I thought, everyone deserves a second chance, and I knew that because it was going to be in person, it’ll be better. On the day of the interview, he had another one at a TV station that morning which he said was so bad. During our interview he said multiple times, “Wow you’re good at this!” or “That’s a great question!” He must have seen I was so genuine, I had done my research, we’re around the same age, I’m different than all the other interviewers and after the first five minutes he stopped the recording to tell me I’m so good at this and asked if we could start again because I deserve something better from him. I thought that was so nice. No one has done that before and that’s something that will always stick with me. He was so respectful. That was one interview that started off challenging, but he is now one of my favourite interviews.

 

Let’s talk about your book, Knowing What I Know Now. What’s it about and how did you get the idea to write a book?

The book is filled with 70 quotes from my guests of what they would tell their 14-year-old selves now. I came up with this because it is a question I ask in all my interviews. “Knowing what you know now, what would you tell your 14-year-old self?” I put that in the interviews originally because I loved the fact that it opened the guests up to talk about their childhood and because there are so many things in our childhood, no matter who we are, no matter what gender or race, we’ve all gone through the same things during childhood, we’ve all experienced trying to fit in, trying to be cool and maybe being a little bit shy. People look up to these celebrities now and think they’re so amazing and I totally agree with them but pretty much every single one of them was shy when they were a kid and it blows my mind! I’m like, “how are they doing what they’re doing right now if they were shy?” So, I wanted to ask something unique like that and when we look back on our past there’s always something we would do differently. As long as we look back on our mistakes and have learned from them. It makes us stronger. Even though I’m telling you to talk to your 14-year-old self, I’m really asking what you would tell the young audience. It goes back to being a positive show and all about advice to people. Some of the advice in the book is similar but it shows that as human beings we’re all the same. Even these celebrities who we think are so different from us, they’re not. Because the answers to this question were so amazing, another great idea my mum had was the book. She said it would be a great idea to have these quotes in one place so you don’t actually have to watch or listen to all of my interviews to be able to get that advice. It’s all there so that’s how the book came about.

 

Any plans for a second book?

Hopefully down the track. It is a great idea for a book because it can be a series if I want it to be because when I was creating it, I said to my mum, “we have a problem. This book will never be done! I do an interview every week. Where do I draw the line and go, no more quotes, this is the book” and that’s what I obviously ended up having to do. That was when my mum said there are so many books out there that are series so why not do another one in the future? So, I would like to release another one.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into journalism and start interviewing?

The advice I would give to up-and-coming journalists is to go into it remembering that we’re all human beings and to go into it with respect, not only for your guests but your peers. You know, other journalists are also trying to find the big stories and get their story on the front of the newspaper. Even though you may be friends with people in your office, you’re really not because there is so much competition, so you want to go into it with respect and know that it is a hard industry. I’m not going to sugar coat it. If you want to be a hard hitting journalist, it takes a real, specific type of person to deal with the negativity. Even though I hate listening to the news right now because it’s all about COVID, When I do, I have so much respect for the journalists who are reporting it because they must be getting bored. So do know it is hard and if you’re going to get into hard hitting journalism, you have to get used to reporting on a lot of negativity. If you want to get into entertainment like me, it’s so much more positive and uplifting. There is drama in there too but not as much. It’s the opposite of hard-hitting journalism which has only a tiny bit of positive news. The only drama and negative news you get in entertainment news is a couple broke up or a celebrity passed away. Also, it’s a whole different thing if you want to create an entertainment company like I have because, just like I said, it’s very competitive and hard but it is rewarding so you need to have passion for it. There will be down days when it’s more difficult, but it will be worth it in the end because you’ll be doing what you love. I don’t look at YouTube comments anymore because unfortunately there are some haters out there and it puts me down so for my own mental health, I’ve decided not to look at it anymore. If I’m having a bit of a down day and I go do an interview, it makes me remember why I’m doing what I’m doing. When I get nice comments from fans, at least I’m making an impact and doing what I set out to do. So, know it’s hard, be passionate about it and have thick skin because there will be rejection, but that’s anything in life really. You just need that one yes. That’s all you should keep your eyes on. That would be my main advice.

Thank you again Lauren, for talking to me and for sharing your experiences with us.

 

If you would like to find out more about Rave It Up, check out the website raveituptv.com which has celebrity news articles and links to the podcast and to buy the book. You can listen to the podcast on all platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts and follow @raveitupshow on Facebook. There is also the Rave It Up Community page that people can join, get behind the scenes content and win some free things.