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Media Training 101

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Media Training 101

A Guide to Meeting the Press

Wiley,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

If you are tempted to lie to a reporter, don’t. If you want to fudge the facts, don’t…and other verities of media life.

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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

This book gives you the essentials about dealing with the media, starting with interviews and calls from reporters. Sally Stewart, former journalist and PR practitioner, delivers the nitty-gritty. Her advice to recognize reporters’ financial and emotional pressures is particularly useful. Reporters have two clear priorities, she says, to write good stories and to go home. If you want their good will, try a little respect, she suggests, although she displays considerable cynicism and negativity about them. Her lessons include getting reporters to pay attention and which reporters to contact and how, be it by phone, e-mail or fax. Stewart tells you how to deal with unexpected calls from the press, and how to decide whether or not you want to be part of a story. If you do, here’s how to make the most of it. And if you don’t, this book tells you how to extricate yourself, if possible. Along the way Stewart explains how to dress for a television appearance. If this paragraph mentions any core skill you don’t already have, getAbstract.com has a newsflash for you: get the book.

Summary

Buy a Dog

If you want a friend, buy a dog. Whatever you do, don’t trust a friendly reporter. Underpaid and often with chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes about the crooked things that go on in business, reporters are not your friends. They may seem affable and sympathetic in their conversations with you, but they are waiting for you to say something embarrassing, deceptive or shocking so they can splash it over the front page in a big headline illustrated by the worst photo of you they can find. It may be your life, your one moment in the glare of publicity, the closest you will ever come - or want to come - to fame, but for the reporter, it’s just another deadline.

You have what you think is a great story, one that puts your product and company in the best possible light, and you’re eager to tell it. Maybe a reporter from a major paper calls you in the course of doing a big story on your industry. Do you want to be in the story?

Be careful. That’s a trick question. Suppose the story is about how your competitors have been doing really badly, laying people off, losing business, maybe even going to jail. You aren’t doing any of those things. So is this an opportunity...

About the Author

Sally Stewart is a former news reporter at USA Today and a commentator for CNN. Since 1996, she has worked as a communications consultant. She heads SA Stewart Communications of Santa Monica, California.

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