A short, measured police briefing after the Huntingdon train stabbings offers a textbook example of what good looks like if you are a spokesperson tasked with giving a statement after a major incident. This video is just a few minutes long but demonstrates so many of the points covered in our standard Crisis Communications training. […]
Waitrose got it seriously wrong last week — first in the way it handled an autistic volunteer, and then in how it responded when the story hit the headlines. For several years, 28-year-old Tom Boyd, who is autistic and has limited communication skills, volunteered at Waitrose in Cheadle Hulme. He clocked up more than 600 […]
Within minutes of the start of President Trump’s address to the Israeli Knesset last week, every major news outlet flashed headlines quoting the same line: “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” Serious analysis came later — about foreign policy, tone, and intent — but in that first wave of headlines, every journalist reached […]
BBC One’s Have I Got News for You — a favourite watch for many old hacks (like us) — became the story itself this week. During the show, presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell repeated a claim made on social media that Euan Blair’s company, Multiverse, had won a government contract to run the new digital ID […]
If you present regularly but want to get better, you can learn a lot from TV news. When you watch the news, notice how presenters use graphics. The visuals have just a handful of words, one chart or image. Clean design, few words. The rest is left to the presenter — to explain, to interpret, […]
Keir Starmer’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday was in many ways more important than his set-piece conference speech. At conference, he speaks to his party; from the studio, he was speaking to the electorate — and a combative, barely respectful interviewer. Against this tough brief, the Prime Minister delivered a workmanlike rather than commanding […]
The coverage of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK has been full of body language analysis. Smiles, leaning in, mirrored gestures — all signs of rapport. On the surface, it looked natural, even warm. But I’d bet good money that on the British side at least, hours of coaching went into making it look […]
An exchange at the Venice Film Festival has been circulating online — and it’s an interesting case study for anyone preparing for media interviews. During a press conference for After the Hunt, Italian journalist Federica Polidoro asked the panel about movements such as Black Lives Matter and MeToo. But she pointedly told actor Ayo Edebiri […]
Zack Polanski hasn’t just taken the Green Party leadership — he’s rewritten the script on how they talk. For years, the Green Party leaned on graphs, facts, and climate-first detail. To some that made them sound like a pressure group, not a contender for power. Polanski is changing all that. His approach: Less data, more […]
At The Media Coach, we often meet leaders who are brilliant in their day-to-day work but feel a wave of dread when the camera switches on or they step up to a podium. It’s completely normal—almost everyone gets nervous before a media interview or presentation. The trick isn’t to banish nerves altogether but to manage […]