It has been a year like no other. But it is not going to stop us from taking our annual look back at the spokespeople who got it wrong over the past 12 months and the media training lessons that can be learnt from their performances.
Delegates on our media training courses often fear a Jeremy Paxman style interview. The former Newsnight presenter’s reputation for challenging interviews and fearsome questions remains intact despite his retirement.
Another high-profile apology and another ‘sorry’ that falls some way short of the mark. So many organisations and people in the media spotlight continue to offer ‘sorry, not sorry’ apologies.
When data breaches are making the news, people typically think of shady cyber criminals being responsible. But damaging breaches are not always caused by someone acting maliciously.
Have you ever wondered exactly what you would learn on a media training course? Would it be beneficial to hear from some recent delegates about what they took from the training and how they believe it will help them in their daily work?
We always stress the importance of personal examples, anecdotes and stories in interviews on our media training courses.
Often at this time of year, our media training blog focuses on the word of the year. Unsurprisingly, ‘lockdown’ has scooped that particular honour in 2020. As we’ve all probably heard more than enough of that particular word lately, we thought we would instead focus on the phrase that has been voted the country’s most-loathsome jargon.
One day you are a local business and the next you are the most famous landscaping company in the world.
On our crisis communication training courses, we often talk about how smartphones have given people the power to be reporters. They can record footage on their phones, post it on social media - or sell it to a newspaper.
On our crisis communication courses, we talk to delegates about the importance of understanding their organisation’s vulnerabilities and trying to anticipate what could place it at the centre of a storm.
“Cold, calculated, evasive answers.” “Sounding like a robot. Not answering questions.” These are just some of the criticisms we saw on social media about one spokesperson’s performance during a TV interview last week
Criticising the journalist. Complaining about tough questions. And walking out before it ended. It’s no wonder that Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes interview has been dominating the news.
Delegates on our media training courses often fear they are going to be put through a Jeremy Paxman style interrogation. Others worry about facing combative interviews from the likes of Nick Ferrari, Kay Burley and Eddie Mair.
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to take part in one of our media training courses? Well, one of our clients, Lymphoma Action, allowed us to shadow their course so that others could see how they felt, what they found most challenging and what they learnt.
“Say it. Mean it. Put it down in legislation.” This was the key message in a media interview that grabbed our attention last week. It is a message that certainly includes some of the factors of effective messaging that we look at in our courses in media and message development & testing courses.
Have you heard the one about the onions that were too sexy for Facebook? As weird as that introduction sounds, it is not the start of a joke.
How about this for an approach to dealing with journalists – don’t deal with them at all? If that seems odd – and perhaps something you would not expect to read in this media training blog – it is worth considering that this strategy seems to have been adopted by Tesla, the world’s most valuable car maker.
When people think about the causes of a crisis, they typically consider things like fatal accidents and catastrophic incidents.
Passion is an important quality for an effective media spokesperson. It helps to draw the audience in, maintain their attention and keep them listening.
There have been many obituaries written about newspapers. Their power has been said to be waning for several years and the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a decline in circulations and advertising revenues.
When Maggie Ogunbanwo's family home and business was the target of a hate crime, growing her profile couldn’t have been further from her mind.
A good apology can go along way to salvaging a reputation during a crisis. But, as regular readers of this blog will know, not all apologies are created equally.
Sometimes it is the shortest interviews that catch your attention. Listening to the radio the other day, it was not the endless reports and debates on Covid testing or the latest Brexit development on the Internal Markets Bill that stood out.
We’ve always prided ourselves on making our media training courses as close to the real thing as possible.
We’ve highlighted several media interviews recently where spokespeople have tried to manage difficult questions by answering something completely different.
Sometimes there are plenty of things for your organisation to shout about and use to try to gain crucial media coverage.
It is always great when you lovely readers and our social media followers let us know about interviews that you would like us to focus on in this media training blog.
Imagine you are in a broadcast interview and a journalist asks you something you simply do not know how to answer.
We’ve looked in some detail in this media training blog about how coronavirus has changed the broadcast media landscape.
“What do you think?” On the face of it, it is a simple enough question. But for many media spokespeople, it appears particularly unwelcome and they continually stumble over attempts from journalists to gain a personal opinion.
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