Check out the transcript of mediabistro.com's seminar "How to Become a Celebrity Interviewer" held on September 8, 2005, in New York City, held down by Precious Williams. MB instructor Williams is a contributing editor at Elle (UK), for whom she interviews celebrities-most recently Jenna Jameson and Portia di Rossi. Precious's profiles, personal essays and investigative pieces have been published in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including The Times, New York, Glamour, Marie Claire, The Daily Telegraph and Details. The transcript is AG-only but here is a taste:

Precious Williams: It's good to get some clips, but you don't have to get your clips from big, well-known publications, necessarily. You can, if you don't mind writing for free a couple of times. You could go to some of the much smaller publications. There are a lot of free health magazines in health food stores, and if you're interviewing someone like Deepak Chopra, he would probably do a small health magazine and then you've got that clip. He's quite a big celebrity so you can sort of do it that way. And the smaller magazines that don't have a big staff are actually grateful to have somebody offering them a celebrity interview for free. And they're not going to be really picky and say, "Who have you written for before?" and all of that stuff.

Or another thing you might have to be willing to do is write on spec. It means that instead of instead of getting an assignment, the editor would say, "I like the sound of that idea, why don't you go away and write and then I if I like it I'll publish it." They're not making any commitment to you until they've seen the finished piece. And you're not necessarily losing out unless you incur a lot of expenses. And it's a good way of getting in with a publication because if you deliver with that spec piece, then they'll trust you. Well, hopefully, anyway.