The Top Three Things I Learned From Media Training
I was fortunate enough to receive formal Media Training to become a media spokesperson of my company. Although I’m a pretty confident…
I was fortunate enough to receive formal Media Training to become a media spokesperson of my company. Although I’m a pretty confident public speaker already and spend much of my week talking with executives, there’s a different set of skills required when working with journalists.
Although I found lots of articles about why media training is so important, there seemed to be a lack of actionable advice from those that have taken courses and have solid experience under the belt.
What is Media Training?
Media Training is designed to help company spokespeople be more confident and effective when dealing with journalists. It enables you to communicate a desired message in a format designed for television, newspapers, or other media outlets. You’ll also learn how to deal with invasive or hostile questioning that detracts from that message.
Lesson 1: Good Storytelling is a Must
Your job as a spokesperson is to communicate a specific message in a way that is engaging and draws interest to your cause. You need to be adept at story telling, weaving in statistics, analogies, and customer examples that resonates with the intended audience.
You may already be comfortable talking in small groups or at public events, but there are few specific things that you must consider when working with journalists:
Journalists need a ‘hook’ — or more specifically, your story must have a sense of jeopardy. What’s so potentially bad that makes your message worth listening to?
Like it or not, you need to talk in sound bites. Think less about sleazy spin doctors and more, as Mark Twain said, “a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense”. Done well, sound bites engage the audience at their level, urging them to learn more, whilst leaving them with a memorable summary that they can retell to their friends.
Give the journalist really strong sign posts and exercise the rule of three. When answering a question, if you say “there are three things to know”, then you can be sure they’ll be listening closely and taking notes. There are many reasons why three is the magic number, but in this circumstance, you need to tell your story in a way that is succinct and memorable.
More generally, you should both simplify your language and use more emotive and evocative words. Rather than “some businesses are potentially facing challenges”, the jeopardy segment of your story is “plunging businesses into chaos”. That certainly doesn’t come natural for me, but I now recognise the tactic in almost all the media I consume!
Lesson 2: It Is Not Your Job To Answer Questions
A common misconception about an interview is that you’re there to answer questions. You are there to tell your story; to control the narrative.
I found this perhaps the most interesting part of my training. As humans, our natural state is to play our part in reciprocal conversation, playing a game of catch, as we toss the ‘mic’ back and forth to one another. In an interview situation however, the dynamic is different.
In an interview, the journalist is there to find a story, and your job is provide one that promotes your cause. To achieve that goal, and avoid a story that detracts from your message, it’s important that you stay focussed on what you want to say.
Get your message and examples across early. Don’t be polite and wait to be asked.
When you’re given an opportunity to tell your story, don’t stop — just keep going. The journalist will interject soon enough if they need something else. I found it incredibly uncomfortable to talk for long periods — it felt really impolite. I suspect that this skill is similar to practicing the art of leaving uncomfortable silences.
When the journalist inevitably interrupts your flow, your job is to “acknowledge” the question, build a bridge back to your narrative, and then continue once again with your story. The art of that “acknowledgement” is a skill in itself — we all know what it looks like when a politician is avoiding a question, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid. You need to respond to the question in such a way that you’re seen to understand what was asked and build a bridge back to your story. One top tip I was given was to identify and repeat the key words or phrases from the question very early in your response. At its most basic, you can respond with something like “I too absolute agree that <thing from the question> is an important topic, but there are many challenges people face and the one I’m focussed on today is <back to your story>”.
Lesson 3: Don’t Feed The Trolls
Inevitably, you will get asked questions that you either you cannot or should not answer. You must stay composed and not rise to the bait in an interview. This was the one part of my training that everyone, myself included, really struggled with.
Before becoming an official spokesperson for my company, I completed a 30-minute mock interview, which included a few “hostile” questions. It was remarkable how capably and calmly I was able to answer those in comparison to the role play exercises during the initial training where I found myself tied in knots, down a path of increasingly more aggressive questioning that became impossible to answer.
There are a few types of questions you can’t answer:
You are not confident of the answer. If you aren’t certain of a specific fact, don’t be afraid to say so. You can divert the conversation with phases like “I don’t know the answer to that right now, and I can follow up with you later on that, but what I can tell you is <your story>”.
You are limited by company policy. These are perhaps the easiest to respond to. “I’m sorry, but it’s against our company policy to give that information”. There is little need to dress it up any further.
It is not your place to answer. Perhaps you’re being asked about a work colleague, a previous employer, or a competitor. It’s not your place to speak on their behalf, so don’t! If a journalist asks if the rumours are true that Bob Smith is joining your team, you might say something like “we’re always looking to hire the best, but you are not in a position to talk about Bob’s career plans and they should direct questions to him”.
Depending on the subject of the interview or what’s happening in your company, you will likely already have some inclining of the types of difficult questions you might get asked. I would strongly encourage you to work with your PR team and other company spokespeople to rehearse answers to these.
The goal is to keep the audience on your side by providing a reasonable explanation as to why you cannot answer the question.
Sadly, it’s unlikely the journalist will stop there — they might ask the question again, provide “evidence” of their assertion, or continue down another route of similarly hostile questions. It will go against all your human instincts, but the response is simple: stay calm, and just repeat your previous answer.
No, honestly, repeat what you just said. Human nature will be to rephrase the answer, or include some further information — don’t do that — you’ll open yourself to further questions, inevitably begin to get flustered and neither of those will end well. Remember, you are there to tell your story and to control the narrative.
Summary
I’ve obviously still got a lot to learn, but I hope this was in some way useful to folks. Media Training has been one of the most useful soft/human skills I’ve learned in my 20+ year career and I would strongly encourage anyone in leadership or working in an advocacy position to get themselves trained up. Media Training will make you a better, more confident speaker and will teach you how to better handle difficult conversations.