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Having a powerful key message is a fundamental principle of any media interview. Whether you have a new product you are about to launch, have made a crucial scientific discovery or have been making news for negative reasons, you need a message that compels, convinces and persuades the audience.

Prepare for unexpected media interview questions by understanding why they are asked and learning effective techniques to handle them confidently. Discover expert tips in our latest blog post.

We have largely stayed clear of looking at the interviews produced by our politicians during the general election campaign. But now that we have cast our votes and the campaigning has finished, we can say that it was the media training gift that just kept on giving.

Hopefully, you will have already seen our compilation of the worst interviews of 2019. But what about those spokespeople who delivered strong media performance in the past year?

Observing one of our recent media training courses, I saw an interview I hadn’t seen before. It was shown towards the end, as the course touched on crisis communication and how to manage interviews when you are in the spotlight for the wrong reasons.

Last week was a strange one for media interviews. There was, of course, the now-infamous Prince Andrew interview with Newsnight. And at the other end of the scale, there was an interview given by a sporting star that went viral for completely different reasons.

Plenty has been said and written about Prince Andrew’s now-infamous interview. And if you saw our media training blog earlier this week, you’ll know that we have had our say.

When you visit a restaurant, you don’t expect to find customers washing the dishes, taking the orders and brewing coffee. But that was the scene in one restaurant when customers realised there was just one overwhelmed member of staff on duty.

We are sometimes asked on our media training courses whether interview requests should ever be turned down. The answer, perhaps not surprisingly considering what we do, is that these bids should almost always be accepted.

There are some interviews that are simply compelling viewing. And Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview on Saturday certainly falls into that category.

Sometimes you can say too much in an interview. This is particularly true towards the end when the reporter tries to bring in wider questions, usually about another story that is in the news. This is something we often discuss during our media training courses.

Can you ‘guarantee’ that what has gone wrong won’t happen again in the future.

For those not familiar with the term Bridging, it is a media training technique which helps spokespeople take control of interviews.

Every organisation, big or small, needs spokespeople who can promote its achievements and defend its reputation in a crisis.

‘Has this press release been seen by everyone?’ is a question that strikes a sense of dread into comms managers. It means your carefully crafted words, designed to grab the attention of the world’s media, have to be approved by a number of senior colleagues around the organisation, many of whom may not have any comms experience, media training or understanding of how the media works.