Given the rapidly failing state of the news media business in North America and Europe it is becoming ever more important that people be very careful when agreeing to do a media interview.

Ethical and professional standards have slipped badly in the last several years, particularly in television news and even more so in local television news. So much emphasis is put on shaping the story before any interviewing, or indeed any other journalism is done, that distortions are inevitable. That coupled with a shrinking journalistic job market means that unprincipled and inexperienced reporters will do anything to make their stories more interesting, not for the public, but for their bosses.

There are so many horror stories of people agreeing to do print, radio,  or TV interviews in good faith only to find their words ignored, twisted, or changed in the final product that it would make a good story in its own right, except no one would report it properly.

News outlets that are confronted by outraged organisations that feel unfairly treated now tend to fall back to the very letter or the meaning of journalistic accuracy. If they can demonstrate that you did indeed say the words quoted, or say words that were close enough to what the news outlet believed you said, then they will congratulate themselves on being accurate and get rid of you and your complaint speedily.

The old notions of Fairness and Balance in news reporting are gone from much of the journalistic landscape.

So what to do if you are asked for an interview?

The first thing I tell clients who ask for help on this is to remind them that they have an absolute right to say no to a reporter. There is nothing in law or society that can compel you to undergo an interview.

Understand this –

• The public Does Not have a right to Know anything from a private citizen or company.

• There is no Need to Know

Now, having said that there are still many good reasons why you would want to go through an interview, especially if it has a chance of promoting your organization or product. It is also vital during a Media Crisis that you put yourself forward and get your side out. But don’t do it unless you have a pre-prepared Media Crisis Plan and some good professional backing.

Okay, the reporter from Podunk Local TV News has asked for an interview; what do you do?

If you have any doubt or uncertainty, take the details and promise to call back while you think about. Reporters are very good about being persistent and most would make terrific telemarketers selling dodgy timeshares but they need you more than you need them.

When you negotiate with the reporter make it very clear that you both understand what the interview will be about and stand firm on only discussing that aspect of things.

Okay, you’ve agreed and there is a time and place. Since this is a television interview be prepared for a lot of technical screwing around, retakes, cover shots, reverse angles, etc and etc. Television means technology and very intrusive technology at that. Be prepared to have a lot of your time wasted.

Stick to your central message, the reason why the interview is being done in the first place. The reporter may well want to dive off into other subject areas but you do not have to follow. There is nothing wrong with saying, “That’s not why I am here today”, “I cannot discuss that.” Sure the reporter may try to play lines like that in a sinister way through the editing process but it is a very hard thing to pull off convincingly, especially if you and your organization has a Communications Strategy Plan built around a clear message that you repeatedly get out in front of other media.

In the same manner don’t be afraid of saying, “I have no idea whatsoever”

Be aware that very little of what you say will end up on air. It is not uncommon for a reporter to used just :08 seconds from a 12 minute interview. I myself have used as little as two or three seconds from a 15 minute interview when producing news reports.

Print reporters are different and they will want the most mundane and specific things from you like your age, number of kids, and every conceivable detail about your message or product. You can say no whenever you want to anything they ask.

Radio can be a real joy. It is a mix of print and television reportage.

Unless you are dealing with the highly trained radio journalists of the giants of the business, CBC, NPR, BBC, ABC Australia etc, you will likely have all sorts of opportunity to say exactly what you want the way you want it. That’s because, apart from the giants, radio is a wasteland of inexperienced and even ignorant reporters. Many are focused on breaking into television and have little inclination to learn the techniques of proper interviewing. You can just romp all over reporters like that and they won’t even notice.

But please don’t do any of this without professional media training. If you don’t have a Communications Director to train you then do some leg work of your own and find a local Media Training company. In just a couple of days they can prepare you to handle anything.

And please, for the love of the gods of the multiverse, don’t talk to reporters unless you have a clear and concise Media Communications Strategy, preferably with an attached Media Crisis Plan.

This article comes from by Rick Grantwww.rickgrant.com and is copyright

How To Survive the Media Interview – Talking With Reporters

An odd thing is happening to journalism amid the chaos of humanitarian disasters these days.   It’s becoming as managed, influenced, nuanced and manipulated as the worst of government spin controlled journalism.

Over the past years I’ve experienced at first hand a most remarkable change in how the media works  in humanitarian disasters such as Albania, Kosovo, East Timor Afghanistan and as I see now, in Haiti. Amid the hellish dangers of such places there is now in place a formal dance of intricate detail between United Nations officials, aid workers, reporters, and news managers.   It’s a dance that allows a reporter newly parachuted into some vile human emergency to hit the ground running and be filing within hours, if not minutes, direct from the front lines or from the edge of a mass grave.

The days of a foreign correspondent needing to spend huge amounts of time just finding out where to go for information in a disaster area, after spending hours if not days just trying to find accommodation and a filing point are gone.

Instead, there is an mobile world wide army of disaster officials, information officers, spokespersons, and spin doctors that can provide the itinerant reporter with everything they need, including food, lodging and transportation.  Indeed, it is now possible for a lazy reporter, and there are too many of those, to file as though from the circles of hell yet in reality be sitting in the closest five star hotel.

In fact I believe that information flow and control by UN Agencies and relief groups is now so thorough, so complete, that it is possible for a reporter to make a name reporting a humanitarian disaster without leaving Ottawa, Toronto, New York, London, or wherever.

Now, I’ve been on both sides of the fence.  While I advise aid groups on how to handle the media and I have managed information campaigns directed at foreign correspondents, I have also spent time in the back-of-beyond amidst the starving and the murdered with a microphone and taperecorder.  As a result I can bring a unique, if schizoid, perspective of what’s going on.

What I’ve seen over the past years is a disturbing acceleration of news management that started about the time of the Great Ethiopian Famine and the Collapse of Somalia, but then continued to a somewhat greater extent in Bosnia.  I say disturbing from the viewpoint of a former broadcast journalist, yet I am in the thick and heart of that very management.

In places such as Chechnya, East Timor, Bosnia, and a bunch of smaller cesspits of human disaster, and in others to come, there exists a sophisticated world wide media industry managed by aid groups and United Nations agencies.

Every aid group of any significance now has a corps of information people who at the very drop of a starved nomad, the spark of an ethnic cleansing house burning, the wail of a war orphan, will be on an aircraft within hours doing their damndest to race the true foreign and war correspondents to the sharp end, the place where people are dying.

Until a few years ago the only people racing to the nasty sharp end were those journalistic firefighters or Bang Bang Artistes who only come alive during the overture to Armageddon.  They’d get the word out and that would goad the UN and aid groups to mobilize and it would trigger the usual influx of other reporters.

But these days for every hard bitten disaster journalist plunging into the front lines there is a humanitarian spokesperson or media manager right there beside them.

The aim isn’t to necessarily get the name of your organization into the reporters’ stories, although that is nice when it happens, but rather to become a source of information for those who haven’t or won’t leave home base.

The goal is to establish yourself and your organization as a credible source of information, to become an ersatz reporter or news agency that others will turn to as a matter of course.  This results in publicity and sometimes media prominence which pays off hugely in increased government funding and public donations.

The United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees play this game seriously and very well.

Every day in a disaster area now starts the same way.  The local UNHCR spokesperson will hold a morning briefing on latest developments.   If a military force is involved then a senior officer will follow, then a series of lesser briefings will be hosted by the aid groups active in the region.  Throughout the rest of the day an army of aid information officers will chat up, lobby, spin, and befriend reporters and especially the all important news producers with the big television networks.

At the same time, information is being relayed to domestic media back home from the head offices of the aid groups.  News releases tailored for domestic if not local interest flow on a daily basis, op-ed pieces are written, interviews and news conferences are arranged for returning aid workers.

The ease of getting information out of even the most isolated disaster area through internet links, satellite phones, and certainly in the cases of Sudan, Iran, East Timor and Albania/Kosovo, by mobile phone means that outfits such as CARE Canada, WorldVision, the Red Cross, or any of the other biggies, can and do provide domestic news outlets in Canada with information before even their own reporters can.

It’s not just information.  When Albania was overwhelmed by Kosovar refugees I was able to provide video clips over the internet for any agency that wanted them.  Local radio stations which are notoriously understaffed and utterly unable to put anyone into the field were able to connect into the CARE web site and download a 30 second report for use on their newscasts.  It didn’t matter to them that the piece was supplied by a CARE official who mentioned the organization’s name as much as decency allowed and clearly had a point of view if not bias — it was material they could use.

Aid agencies and organizations these days now have elaborate written Communication Strategies every bit as tightly focused and as effective as those in any major corporation.  More and more aid groups are building communications departments which, if you blur your eyes just a bit, look an awful lot like news gathering operations.  In fact, quite a number of these departments are staffed with former journalists.

It is now entirely possible for an unscrupulous reporter to cobble together a mass of first hand material, in word, picture, and sound from aid agency sources and produce a seemingly on the spot report from say, Iran, and yet never have left this country.  I hope to god it hasn’t happened yet but I just know that it will.

In the meantime the true professional disaster reporters will continue putting their lives on the line.  Of the perhaps two or three hundred real Bang Bang Artistes in the world a significant number are Canadian.  Whether they are working for the Globe, , the CBC, the National Post, any of the American networks, or some other global news outlet, they do their job so well and honorably that people like me don’t have to bother worrying about getting their attention.  They decide on their own whether something is a story and that’s the way it really should be.

I wish their tribe long life.

This article comes from by Rick Grantwww.rickgrant.com and is copyright

Amid the Ruins – A Poor Kind of Journalism

One of the basic skills that television news reporters need is the ability to speak to camera without notes.

Commonly called, Stand-ups, these short segments showing little more than the reporter saying a couple of sentences at the end of a news piece to sum things up are a real challenge for many.

Credit: Ben Sutherland

I’ve worked alongside some reporters who will do upwards of 20 takes, or attempts to camera before they get their 18 seconds of wisdom out properly.

For the uninitiated you might think that the solution is to write the words down on cards to be held just outside of camera shot so the reporter can read them off.  That will work only if there is a third person to hold the cards, and most frequently there isn’t a third person, and it can only work if the reporter is skilled enough not to stare at the cards.  Humans are highly adapted to detecting eye movement and direction and we can all tell instantly when someone is looking at us, even across a room, or whether a reporter on television is looking at the camera or some notes to one side.

You might think that memorization would be the answer.  For some that is true, but unless you have had proper training as an actor everything you say to camera will scream “I am desperately trying to remember the next word I have to say after this word and then the next one, and just what the hell was I supposed to remember.”

So, how do you explain how some reporters can speak coherently and effortlessly to camera for far longer than the typical 18 second closer?

Practice goes a long way but the main skill comes from acting.  While everyone has their own techniques the main one that pays dividends for the inexperienced reporter is focus; simple concept that completely escapes many journalists.

In essence, you decide what you want to get across, the message, decide on the general thrust of your thoughts, shape them to your own way of speaking and then like a frog leaping from one lily pad to another across a fathomless pond, you proceed from focus to thought and to sentence until you are done.

Once you have this basic technique it is possible and reasonable to pull off the most complicated, script-less, and cogent performances with a minimum of stress.

The greatest example of a performance to camera that I know of is Robert Carlyle’s 5 minute 30 second Johnnie Walker Scotch commercial where not only does he deliver a flawless script but he does it on one continuous camera shot, without cues or notes, and while walking and performing through a rock strewn landscape.

While you watch this incredible performance also be aware of the unbelievable camera work which is as much a delight to watch as is Carlyle.  (The bit near the beginning where the Highland Cow turns her head with his movement was unscripted and unplanned and very nice)

You are going to have to take my word for it but there was no post-production audio work other than equalization etc in the making of this — in other words nothing was fixed up in a voice-over studio afterwards.

Carlyle worked over two days before on the 40th take he pulled it off.  I could try for 40 days and never do this.  I know some people who wouldn’t be able to keep things in the air for 40 seconds no matter how long you kept them before the camera.

There are a couple of things going on here that helped him greatly.

First, he is a highly trained actor.

And second, notice that he is performing actions in relation to props and locations as he goes.  He clearly had blocked out the walk so that when he came to a particular rock, bend in path, or prepared prop such as the whiskey barrels etc, he knew that he had to be saying a specific thing in his script at that precise moment.

And that’s the key technique that television reporters can use to nail their 18 seconds of on-camera faux wisdom.

Put some movement into those 18 seconds.  Start talking, take two steps, raise arm and point, gesture to camera – all of these elements and things like them in an on camera standup or bridge give you markers.  The act of finishing the two steps acts as a trigger to the next phrase, the arm raise prompts for another sentence, the gesture to camera triggers to emphasis you need in your concluding statement.

If you just stand still in front of the camera, have no clear idea of the kinds of things you want to say (never mind the actual words) and try to look natural, then all you will do is provide endless fun for the video editor who will snigger uncontrollably as butchered take after take comes up on screen.

This is a skill that any television reporter without brain damage can master with some practice.  Watch the Johnnie Walker commercial a few times and see what you can learn.  Also, pay particular attention to BBC World Television reporters.  They are the best in the world at this stuff, not because they are intrinsically better journalists, (although in fact they probably are,) but because they have been trained and trained in how to do it.  They also practice, or rehearse, every chance they get.

I have seen some of the best pull off 60 second ad-lib walking-talking, all but dancing, performance to camera without a single mistake and in one take.

One final tip.  If you stumble three times in your stand-up, at about the same point in your spiel, then back off for a couple of minutes and rethink what you are trying to say.  Repeated stumbles on the same word or in the same spot mean that you do not have a clear focus, your thoughts aren’t right, your internal cues aren’t working, and you are probably trying to use a word that you would never normally use.

Plowing on through another 43 takes is unprofessional and a waste or everybody’s time.

This article comes from by Rick Grantwww.rickgrant.com and is copyright

How TV Reporters Can Perform Better on Camera by Watching a Scotch Commercial