The Media Interview

Part of a posting by Alex Zuffoletti, a graduate student in journalism, about her class’s trip to the IMG/Bollettieri Academy, which trains high-level athletes:

one talk that I did enjoy was with these two former actors. They led the “game on” aspect of the program, which basically teaches sports stars, or wannabe sports stars, to not bore everyone with their talk about their training, their sports performance, and their diet. They need to have “coins” (interests, personal qualities, something fascinating to say), so that people will want to be friends with them, and so that they don’t look like stupid jocks when the media interviews them.

I’m not sure about wanting people to be friends with you, but having “coins” to use during your media interview is crucial for connecting with your audience.

Advice from a media training guide produced for the Texas Department of Transportation has people talking in the blogosphere and in the mainstream media:

“Keep calm. Leave wrestling to the pigs. They always end up looking like pigs.”

Texas state senator Dan Patrick, who’s a radio talk show host, appeared on Glenn Beck to voice sentiments he also expressed in a letter to the TxDOT:

According to the media report, TxDOT’s vendor refers to those who host or call talk radio as ‘pigs.’ This is just another sad example of the total lack of respect certain segments of government have for the people it is to serve.

I think the point of the advice is: when faced with hostile, crude, obnoxious behaviour during a talk show, don’t act that way yourself - rise above it and remain calm. No one is saying that all talk radio hosts and callers are pigs.

I don’t know what media report the senator was referring to, but it sounds like someone in the media was taking it personally and took the comment out of context. And isn’t it that kind of poor reporting that the TxDOT is trying to fight by being prepared with some media coaching?

According to an article from the San Antonio Express-News, the TxDOT commissioned the media training as part of a campaign to sell people on new toll roads being proposed:

The agency… has a $20,000 contract for talk-radio training for transportation officials with the Rodman Co., which subcontracted with ViaNovo, whose team includes former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd. It plans another $4,500 training class, and the two consulting companies plan two telephone town-hall meetings at a cost of $17,480.

Rodman and ViaNovo worked on the radio training guide, said TxDOT spokesman Chris Lippincott, who also had input on the document, titled “Talking on Talk Radio.”

“The talk radio environment runs the gamut from productive and thoughtful to vitriolic and silly,” Lippincott said. “We certainly want to prepare (agency spokespeople) for all possibilities, and that includes everyone from a skeptical talk-show host to an outright hostile caller.”

In her blog posting, The High Cost of a Six-Figure Book Advance, Sallie Goetsch makes the following points, which apply to anyone trying to get the word out about their product, not just authors:

Getting into the public eye

To get visible enough fast enough, you probably need a publicist, which means shelling out several thousand dollars. In order for media attention to do you any good, you have to look good and sound good every time you appear. That means getting professional media coaching before you start lining up interviews to make up for not being a celebrity. You need to arm yourself with a repertoire of sound bites for all occasions and rehearse until you can spout them in your sleep.

That doesn’t just take money, it takes time. It takes work. And no one can do it for you, either, because you, as the author, have to be the one in the limelight.

I can’t stress Sallie’s last point enough - media coaching costs money, yes, but what it really takes is time; the time to practice the skills you learn and to keep revisiting them even when you’re experienced at interviews.

As with anything, a coach doesn’t do the work for you; they help you understand what to do and how to do it. Your time with a media coach is just the beginning of a lot of practice.

Found this on the blog of 2nd Lieutenant James Kirby with the 82nd Airborne Division:

Today we began our training on hand to hand contact and had our first pt session. We ran about 4 miles at a slow pace and sprinted a quarter mile at the end. It was so hot and humid at 7 that we were all dripping sweat. It looked like we had ran through a storm. I got to shower afterwards and we had classes on taking charge of a platoon and media interviews. Then was lunch and 4 hours of hand to hand combat training which was fun but exhausting. I’m headed to bed early tonight because PT is early again. [my emphasis]

I’ll keep this on hand in case clients tell me they’re too tired to do a media training session

wall·flow·er: a person who from shyness or unpopularity remains on the sidelines of a social activity

Are you being a wallflower in your media interviews? Are you waiting on the sidelines of the conversation, hoping the interviewer will ask you THE QUESTION?

Never let yourself come away from an interview saying “I wish they’d asked me about X”. Even if it should have been the interviewer’s number one question to ask, it’s up to you to make sure the answer is given. Your key message should never be dependent on an interviewer asking the right questions; you’re responsible for getting your point across.

I was talking to a client the other day about this point. She has a book which is explicitly for teachers, but there’s a lot in it which can be used by parents as well, and when talking to mainstream media, your audience has a lot more parents than teachers. So we focussed our media training on ways to relate the book to parents, through examples, anecdotes, etc.

Several of her interviewers saw the parent connection themselves and asked about it, but others did not. How’d my client do when the interviewers didn’t ask how parents can use the book? She was no wallflower…

You may recall the story this past August of a young Austrian woman, Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive in a basement for over eight years. Thanks to Canuckflack I found this article from Der Spiegel detailing the public relations and media planning which her advisors did for her in the days and weeks following her escape.

I’ve pulled out the most relevant material for media interviews, but the whole article is worth a read:

From the media consultant’s point of view, there were a few glitches during the first two weeks after’s Natascha’s escape. The newspapers wrote that Natascha doesn’t love her mother - Brigitta Sirny, whose maiden name is Kampusch - and that she didn’t want to talk to her, much less move in with her. But people like children who love their parents. Still, it’s not too late, Ecker says. The blemish can still be corrected. That’s why the interview has to happen right now - at the point on his drawing that he’s marked with a circle, exactly two weeks after the escape.

The interview will be shown on television this evening. Then numerous newspapers in Germany and Austria will print it and comment on it. They’ll take a very close look at Natascha Kampusch. Ecker knows things will turn out well. Everything is moving in the right direction now. “The old ladies will cry, and people will love her,” he says. No one needs to tell him that the rules he’s dealing with are those of soap operas.

There were good reasons for Natascha Kampusch to present herself on television. “Everyone wanted to see her, and they wanted to see her face. The paparazzis would have tracked her down like Lady Di.” The first digital photographs, secretly taken with mobile phones, were already circulating in Vienna, and they were being offered for prices as high as €14,000 ($17,777). There was no way of stopping what was happening, Ecker says.

He didn’t put pressure on Natascha Kampusch to give the interview now. He explained to her why it was necessary, and she agreed.

She selected the ORF interviewer along with Ecker. Ecker went through the questions with the other advisors, and then with her. He sat down in a recording room with Natascha for four hours and did a trial run of the entire interview. He asked her every single question. He gave her tips about how to sit and how to look - but most of all about how to handle specific questions. Ideally, she should talk about herself, her character traits, her mourning, her strength.

The best possible answer to questions about her relationship to her kidnapper? “There was no relationship between us.” Questions about her relationship to her mother should be answered as follows: “We’re very close.” Natascha Kampusch and Ecker watched the recorded mock interview together and evaluated it. Natascha Kampusch said she enjoyed the trial run. Ecker says he felt worn out.

On the air

She didn’t follow all of his advice, but she followed most of it…

We may complain sometimes about the quality of shows on mainstream television, but there are far more well-written and certainly more well-produced programs today compared with, say, thirty years ago, and not just because there are far more programs. That’s due in part to far more competition than there was thirty years ago - there are more opportunities for quality to find a venue.

PR and Social Media blogger, Ed Lee, makes a similar point about the future of media interviews:

in an era of the democratisation of media where more and more people are being called for interviews, and not just from the C-suite, the media and those who consume the media are bored with stale old rent a quotes…

simple percentages would suggest that the better interviewees rise to the top and are asked [b]ack. ergo people are exposed to more people who actually give good interview and therefore become less and less tolerant of those who give bad interview…

Another way of looking at this is that in a universe of millions and millions of “channels”, you’ll need to give a better interview if you want your message to stand out, even within niche markets. It’s not enough for a romance writer, for instance, simply to get an interview on a romance blog - if there are six thousand romance blogs, you’d better make your interview worth reading over all the other romance writers being interviewed.

And if we look at this from the standpoint of media coaching, while there will always be a demand for “spin coaching” - getting out of tough questions - I think there’s going to be far more demand for media coaching which helps people prepare to be, as Ed puts it,

charming, intelligent, knowledgable and funny so you can appeal to those watching while answering the questions and telling your own story at the same time.

Ok, here’s my excuse for trying a cool, new, simple polling system called Quimble:

I’ll keep you posted on the results - and see if this is going to work for more weighty subjects

Just to throw in my two cents worth, I use these two terms interchangeably in my work, though I tend to prefer Media Coaching because a lot of what I do is one-on-one and I feel that coaching better describes that process. I think of Media Training for situations where you’re doing group work.

BTW, saw this polling system on Morgan McLintic’s PR blog where he does a Monday Morning Poll.

Great posting from Eric Bergman on the IABC Media Relations Commons blog about the value of fake ambush interviews during training sessions. On the face of it, making someone do an interview with no prep, on the spot, seems like a good way of showing the importance of preparation, but Bergman argues that it does more harm than good, making an already nervous trainee more nervous and scaring the rest of the class. He also suggests that the tactic is indirectly being used to place the trainer in a position of pwoer. Many of the posted comments agree.

Not sure where I stand on this. Seems like there might be ways to do this without terrifying people. I want to post about this more down the road. Of course, having a video of a real interview where the person wasn’t prepared might be just as effective… what do you think?

Bergman also points out that, in the real world, ambush interviews (where the person isn’t just unprepared, but has no idea anyone would even want to interview them) are virtually non-existent anyway - and that I would certainly agree with.