The Media Interview

I’ve spoken on this blog about media interview expert John Sawatsky’s work at ESPN, helping sports reporters be better interviewers. On the flip side there’s been a lot of buzz in US college sports circles about the need for media training college athletes - something that’s mandatory in many professional sports - following a number of highly-publicized incidents with college teams (Duke lacrosse, Northwestern soccer).

Lauren Reynolds offers up a good summary of the issue at ESPN.com:

Student-athletes behaving badly is nothing new. The advent of social networking sites that allow people to post pictures, videos and information about themselves to a worldwide community — sites like MySpace and Facebook — have put the private lives of students-athletes in the public domain. Digital cameras and cell phones with picture and video capability allow the public to catch athletes in private moments, whether in a dorm or at a bar, and easily share those pictures with the rest of the world.

It’s a whole new world for coaches and athletic department staffs who previously only worried about what sports reporters had to say. The popularity of fan-generated content, which reports every rumor — accurate or not — is a beast few collegiate programs are equipped to handle.

Enter sports media trainers, a relatively new trend in the collegiate public relations landscape. These specialists work with athletic departments to determine how they would like their schools to be viewed in the press. They also work with coaches and players to make sure they best represent the school’s desired image.

One of the biggest problems pointed out by Shannon Holt, in her article Ambush Makeover: Intercollegiate Media Training, is that young college athletes often seem oblivious to the public nature of the internet - they’ve grown up publishing everything and anything about themselves:

We are constantly hearing of horror stories about students being harassed and stalked because of their personal websites. There is even one guy who deliberately searches on the Internet for pictures posted by athletes, showing themselves and fellow teammates participating in illegal activies (i.e.-hazing rituals, incidents involving drugs and alcohol, etc.). The photos found are posted on his personal website, and shown to school officials.

Most people would be saying “duh” to these athletes posting personal information. Everyone knows that the Internet is a public information source. Common sense, right? I believe it is the responsibility of the University to make student-athletes aware of such incidents. The University should include in its media training the proper way to handle posting sites, whether it be a community.webshots.com page or a blogging site.

[Sidenote: Shannon points out that media training in general needs to catch up with the role played by social media - so true!]

Here are some articles from college papers concerning media training in college athletics:

TCU Daily Skiff

SMU Daily Campus