Why everyone can benefit from media training
If you’re a confident person, the first to speak up in a room - you may feel like you don’t need media training.
If you’re a company spokesperson who knows the service or offering inside out - you may feel like you don’t need media training.
If you’re a journalist who lives and breathes the press day in, day out - you may feel like you don’t need media training.
But trust us, you do.
We’ve been offering media training since 2014 to help our clients shine during press interviews.
Undertaking media training provides valuable tools for improving communication, boosting your confidence, managing crises, and enhancing your personal and professional growth. Equipping you with the skills to confidently and successfully navigate the complex but powerful world of media and public communication, it’s an absolute must for anyone who is press-facing.
How can it help?
Far from being a scary experience, media training is a fantastic exercise to understand the way your own mind works when you’re put under pressure. To learn to say what you ‘should’ say, when your instinct is perhaps to say something else.
It can help you to articulate thoughts and ideas clearly and concisely, without preamble and going off on a tangent. We’re all fans of a good story, but perhaps not while live on Sky News!
Media training is also a great tool to understand why the media will ask the questions they do, and why it’s okay to sometimes not answer them, but stick to your key message.
It will also teach you the importance of frontloading - of getting your one big message out first, ahead of anything else, just in case you are cut off, which often happens with breaking news on TV and radio.
And let’s not forget, in an age where information travels at the speed of light, having the skills to manage crises is invaluable. Media training can teach you how to handle tough questions, remain composed under pressure, and mitigate potential damage to your reputation.
How does it work?
We recently organised a media training session for a group of nine from our client, the Retail Trust. For some, it was refresher training having done it the year before. For others, it was their first exposure to it. Over the course of an afternoon, they discovered:
What makes a news story and how to make sure you are providing media with the right content
The importance of prepping whether for print or broadcast, especially when you are being interviewed live
How to bridge when you are asked a difficult or irrelevant question to bring the conversation back to the message you are there to get across
That they are the experts and the media is interested to hear what they have to say
The power of body language, non-verbal cues, what to wear and why it’s okay to um and ah - we all do and it simply indicates you are thinking and not reading from a script
How they are much better than they feared, thanks to playback and feedback
We also held mock interviews for print, radio and TV, ending with a 15-second ‘live’ soundbite.
The result was a room of people who now know how to structure and deliver messages with confidence. With a better understanding of how the media works, they are now equipped to build stronger relationships with the press and present their messages more cohesively.
If you’re interested in arranging a media training session, please give us a shout!
Written by Ella Delancey Jones