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You’ve just delivered the perfect media response. Your answer is on message and perfectly quotable. It will accomplish everything you had hoped.
Then…you say more.
It pains me to see an answer that was brilliant in its first 15 seconds become diluted when it lasts for another minute. An extended answer also risks introducing secondary and tertiary points that offer reporters the ability to quote something relatively unimportant. And sometimes, those unnecessarily long answers lead to a “seven-second stray,” an off-message line that becomes your only quote from the interview.
When I see our trainees deliver a great answer—and then keep going—I tell them this: “When you score a touchdown, get off the field!”...
The prevailing wisdom in PR has been that you should keep hammering away at the key messages you're trying to get across in a media interview, no matter what.Is the reporter asking you a completely unrelated question? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message. Do they want to speak to you about an issue or topic your key messages don't even cover? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message.Is the interview a fairly relaxed conversation about your company's strategy, rather than a reputation-destroying crisis? One size fits all—just repeat your key message.If you do this enough, this line of PR thinking goes, your points will stick and the reporter will repeat them. The industry even gave this approach a name of its very own: "block (the reporter's actual question) and bridge (to your key message)." Great—except it rarely works....
If reporters break their promise to you and ask about a topic they promised they wouldn't, can you say "I'm not here to talk about that topic?"
...Maher’s responses made me think about a question we hear a lot during our media training sessions: What should I do if I’m asked a question about a topic I wasn’t originally booked to speak about? Do I have to answer it, or can I insist on speaking only about the topic we agreed to discuss in advance?...
When one school superintendent was confronted with a challenging situation, she employed a unique approach to handling the news media....
According to the FOX anchor, Ms. Sabolinski didn’t want to show her face because “the story wasn’t about her.” But that’s the case for corporate and organizational leaders much of the time, and they’re still expected to act as spokespersons for incidents that occur under their watch.
Plus, as the school superintendent, this story was partially about her, insofar as she’s the person who’s expected to handle the situation responsibly while keeping parents informed about her actions. Her job in a crisis is to convey a sense of confidence and competence—and hiding her face didn’t help her send that message successfully....
This was an offensive and inappropriate tweet. But was shaming this student on the front-page of a college newspaper over the top?
You've probably heard the statistic that words only account for 7% of how the audience perceives you. The problem? It's completely wrong.In dozens of books and hundreds of articles, you’ll find media trainers, presentation coaches, and communications experts offering a startling statistic: Only 7 percent of the way someone forms an impression of you comes from your words! The remaining portion comes from your voice (38 percent) and your body language (55 percent)!
There’s only one problem: Those statistics are wrong. Completely wrong....
After one of its planes crash landed into San Francisco, Asiana Airlines issued a press release that didn't even acknowledge the victims.
Paul LePage, the controversial Republican governor of Maine, has a long history of contentious relations with the press. But the negative coverage his top environmental regulator received in a few local newspapers recently sent him over the edge.
According to the Portland Press Herald, LePage announced through a spokesperson on Tuesday that his administration “will no longer comment on stories published by the Portland Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel.”
In other words, he’s blacklisting three of his state’s newspapers. He may think he’s punishing them. But he’s the one who’s likely to pay the price....
The owners of the new pizza place in my neighborhood could use a little media training. I say this a bit tongue in cheek… After all, they’re a brand new small business and will likely have little to no interaction with the media. However, their messaging and communications skills could certainly benefit from some help. So please allow me, pizza place around the corner, to give you and our readers a few pointers gratis. Here's why....
Some radio stations don't want to conduct interviews by telephone anymore. Instead, they may ask you to record it yourself using your smartphone.
File this one away as one of the most ill-advised comments ever by a government spokesperson. Lois Lerner, a senior Internal Revenue Service official was on a conference call this afternoon briefing reporters on a brewing crisis. The IRS is admitting (after having denied it for some time) that some of their personnel inappropriately used their positions to target some conservative organizations. When trying to explain some statistics in relation to the matter Ms Lerner, a ranking IRS official, confessed "I'm not good at math." That's like the Surgeon General admitting that she can't stand the sight of blood....
... For example, The Wall Street Journal doesn’t want the same thing from you as People Magazine. Whereas The Journal might just need a quick quote from a financial analyst to plug into a short article, People might be looking to write a three-page profile of an ordinary person who overcame tremendous obstacles to achieve a remarkable feat. So what do the media want from you? It depends on the news organization, the reporter, the story, and the format. But as different as news organizations and reporters are from one another, almost all of them want the same six things from the media spokespersons they interview...
When Should PR Pros ‘Tell Journalists How to Do Their Jobs?’ Doh...bad PR... Well here’s a highly fraught debate: to what degree should PR pros manage the message in content created by the journalists they pitch? When does “making helpful suggestions” turn into “telling journalists how to do their jobs?” This week journalist Jim Romenesko (who everyone in media should follow on Twitter and Facebook) brings us a couple of cases in which he and some of his colleagues believe that PR pros went too far. In the first instance, a reader who is also a newspaper editor received an unusually bold pitch from a man who claims to transcend the traditional role of the flack...
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The TV media no longer conceal their disdain for Donald Trump’s ludicrous spinners. Jake Tapper raps Rudy Giuliani for defending Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns and chides Paul Manafort: “These things, just because you say them, they’re not true!” CNN’s Brianna Keilar takes Kellyanne Conway to task for insisting Trump did not mean to say he’d lock up Hillary Clinton. (“I’m talking about what your candidate is saying, which is more important than what you are saying about this. He is saying she has to go to jail. He is not talking about she has to stand and be judged. He is saying she has to go to jail.”) And practically everyone treats the hapless Jason Miller as a liar, a fool or both.
Bias? No, these TV journalists can no longer bear to pretend Trump’s people are saying anything resembling the truth and are annoyed they have to put them on air essentially to lie to the American people....
CNN.com recently ran a fascinating piece about the “GOP’s secret school,” in which candidates learn how to interact with the media. The school is a reaction to the high-profile crises the GOP has inflicted upon itself in recent years—from Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment to Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a witch” ad—and party officials are determined not to repeat past mistakes.
According to the article:“Since the beginning of 2014, the RNC says it has graduated over 200 operatives and placed many of them as communications directors and press secretaries in Capitol Hill offices and federal campaigns nationwide…[Instructor] Rob Lockwood has also conducted media training boot camps with nearly 1,000 candidates, staff and local political figures in a dozen states.
”It appears that this GOP training class is doing everything right in its effort to improve external communications. There’s good advice here for everyone involved in politics, regardless of party or cause. In this post, I’ll highlight the excerpts that caught my attention most....
If you're going to launch a "War on Fox News" -- and decide to appear on the Fox News Channel anyway -- you should have been prepared better than this.
...The first lesson is this, as stated by Political Wire’s Taegan Goddard: “Pro tip: If you’re running for Congress and pledging a “war on Fox News” then it’s probably best not to appear on Fox News.”
But I only agree with that partially. Appearing on Fox News while pledging a war on the network could have turned this local Democratic candidate into a popular national Democratic hero—if he was a skilled debater who could have held his own against an experienced host....
FishBowl DC has a post out today showing (in a huge surprise to absolutely no one) that even respected national reporters can't agree on what "off-the-record" means.
Toby Harden, the bureau chief of London's Sunday Times, opines that he could "use the information but not attribute it to anyone by name or affiliation or quote it directly." (To many people -- that would be known as "deep background" not off-the-record.)
Susan Page, the Washington Bureau Chief, USA Today, comes closer to the appropriate definition (in our view) saying to her: "...'off the record’ means you can’t use the information in a story and you can’t use the information in reporting...
From corporations to one-person shops, almost any business benefits from media publicity. Whether the story is pitched with the Vocus PR suite or with HARO, we see the incredible results of successful media pitching every day.
Winning that major piece of coverage all hangs on your pitch: a phone call, email, tweet, mailer, or some combination of all four, that convinces a journalist to share your story with the world. You could play it straight or get creative with a personal video as, in these essential pitching tips.
We’ve put together a list of 103 pitching tips – probably our biggest list ever – starting with tips from yesterday’s UnPitching webinar with Scott Stratten that will help you persuade a reporter to share your next piece of news....
It’s easy to find an example of a spokesperson getting a press conference all wrong. It’s less common—and worth noting—when someone gets it exactly right....One such example occurred after Saturday’s plane crash in San Francisco. Deborah Hersman, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), faced cameras shortly after the accident to discuss how her agency would handle its investigation.
During the first half of her short briefing, Ms. Hersman delivered the information reporters needed to file their stories; during the second half, she took three questions.Watch this video. It offers spokespersons everywhere a wonderful example of the right way to run a press conference during a crisis....
In one of its final reports before being pulled off the air, NBCs Rock Center committed a sin in an interview with a Rabbi.
...For us -- the larger teaching point here is no matter the explanation -- you should always protect yourself if you are going into an interview that could in any way be controversial or contentious. We teach our clients that it is kosher to tell the media that they too will be making audio -- or preferably video recordings of every interview.
Armed with that kind of backup -- if you are taken out of context or misrepresented -- you can, as Rabbi Berkowitz did -- correct the record.
In Washington-speak, a "full Ginsburg" is when one person appears on all five major Sunday news programs in a single day. The feat was first performed in 1998 by William Ginsburg , the attorney for Monica Lewinsky. Since then, the trick has been performed about 18 times -- often by Presidential candidates.
If you are not running for office --and you are doing a Ginsburg, chances are you are running for your life. Even if one or two of the interviews is pre-taped, it is hard on a person to keep their energy up and their talking points down.
White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer logged a full Ginsburg this morning. We'll leave to others to rate the substance of his answers -- but the way they were delivered was not impressive....
People will forget much of what you say during an interview. So be careful not to do these three things - or your audiences might remember even less. ...The “U” in CUBE A demands that your messages remain unburdened by three things: wordiness, jargon, and abstractions. The more a message tries to say—and the more abstractly it tries to say it—the less likely it is to be memorable. As a general guide, aim for messages that: have no more than two commas; contain no more than 30 words; and evoke concrete images....
Apparently John Tortorella has little patience for reporters. As coach for the the N.Y. Ranger hockey team, some might argue that media relations is part of his job -- but it is clear that he would rather try to water ski behind a Zamboni than have to respond to journalists.
During my first reporting shift at CNN in 1999, I was invited into a “question” meeting with Wolf Blitzer and his executive producer.
The three of us sat around for 15 minutes, coming up with questions for former Vice President Dan Quayle, who was mounting a bid for the 2000 GOP nomination.
We developed a seemingly impressive list of questions, but I noticed that the questions all fit inside certain categories. For instance, some questions were intended to be “stumpers,” while others called for speculation.
That taught me an important lesson. Spokespersons don’t need to prepare for every possible question. They just need to prepare for every type of question. Below, you’ll find six types of questions reporters always seem to ask—and how to answer them with ease....
Press conferences can play an essential role in media communications, particularly for major news announcements, in political campaigns, and during crises.... Press conferences can be tricky, since reporters from competitive news organizations often play a game of one-upmanship to see who can ask the most difficult question. For that reason, press conferences—especially those about controversial or challenging topics—require a deft spokesperson. Ask yourself whether a press conference is truly the best way to release information before scheduling one. If you decide to proceed with a press conference, here are four rules to remember...
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Smart media relations advice from Brad Phillips.