Journalists are not clients or customers – handle with care
Journalists are not clients or customers and this seems to confuse those planning to speak with them for the first time.
One of the great advantages of being a consultant of any sort but a media trainer, in particular, is you get a huge variety of experience. We get to see and experience the cultures that have grown up inside the dozens if not hundreds of businesses and organisations we work with.
And from this privileged position I can see, with great clarity, how different people have very different programmes – let’s call it emotional programmes – running when they’re faced with a journalist (or trainer) for the first time.
People vary enormously in how they approach a media interview before they have been trained.
Journalists – how should you treat them?
These range from being much too risk-averse, convinced every and any syllable might be twisted and used against the interviewee or the company – all the way across the spectrum to people who are simply too keen to please. Where a person is on this spectrum seems to bear little relation to how senior they are, or indeed how real the media risks are.
Anyone trained by The Media Coach team will know we think you should approach journalists in a disciplined way, it is never just a chat.
Defensive interviews serve no one
However, those too aware of the risks, and without the information on how to handle the risks, will give a very defensive interview: short answers, usually unhelpful and very determined to be dull at all costs. There are lots of problems with this approach.
- Short answers mean you give up control of the interview every 10-15 seconds and wait for another question.
- The journalist is bound to get frustrated and feel they have wasted their precious time. They will have a problem because the interview will be difficult to write up and they may have to do more work elsewhere.
- The journalist will find it difficult to quote the interviewee and therefore be much more determined to try and put words into his or her mouth.
- At the very least, they will probably not want to talk to the person again.
- But it could be worse; the journalist may conclude the interviewee is hiding something and start digging around either in the interview or separately, to try and find the dirt.
There is nothing wrong with being professionally friendly, in fact, we would advocate this as the right approach.
Waiting for a trap to spring is no way to manage an interview.
People-pleasers are more likely to say something stupid
At the other end of the spectrum, the people-pleasers run the risk of being exploited by journalists.
These people, in an interview, will focus only on answering questions in an expansive and helpful way. The problem with this is that journalists rarely know the right questions to ask – to some extent all interviews are a fishing expedition. In a worse case scenario, our helpful interviewee can be bounced around, asked and answering all sorts of questions on subjects that are not core to the organisations interests.
If an interviewee is too anxious to please, they run the risk of being exploited.
- Helpful people asked a question that they don’t know the answer to, may end up waffling around trying to be vaguely positive but also stay out of trouble. The longer they are talking the more likely they are to say something ill-advised. So for example, if asked about some controversial aspect of the work of a regulator for your industry, we would probably advise that you close down this line of questioning very quickly. Say something like ‘this is not my area of expertise’ or ‘that is a question for them’ or ‘we work closely with the regulator but I am not going to comment in detail’. However, if you waffle around trying to be positive you are likely to end up saying something like ‘it’s a very difficult area’, ‘I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes’, ‘I know our xyz department really struggles with this’ or even ‘they’ve clearly got this one wrong’. All of these phrases can be used to build a story that suggests your business has chosen to publicly criticise the regulator.
- Even if you don’t say anything inappropriate you will still have spent a lot of the interview talking about something you would rather not see in print.
- Helpful people are also easy to manipulate into giving quotes they wouldn’t have chosen to give. They are more likely to pick up language from the question e.g. a journalist might say ‘I understand this is a nightmare for you’ and the people-pleasing interviewee might respond ’well it is a bit of a nightmare yes’ – enough to give a screaming headline.
- Being overly obsequious may lose you credibility with your tough, streetwise journalist.
So we suggest you are professionally friendly, expansive (up to a point) and use prepared messages whilst closing down or moving away from questions that are not in your interest to answer. Easy really.
Media Interviews? We can help
If you would like help or training in how to handle a media interview positively and safely, we would be delighted to work with you.
Lindsay Williams is based in London but runs training sessions in multiple time zones, including the US, Europe, Africa and Asia, working online or travelling to host small and large scale training events. With 20 years of experience as a communications consultant with corporations and international organisations, Lindsay also runs Personal Impact Training and Pitching Via Zoom courses.
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