Last week when Alex Rodriguez blasted his 600th home run, well-respected sports journalist and personality Bob Costas was interviewed about the subject on live radio by Mike and Mike in the Morning. Then Costas asked for a "do over" a little later in the show to better clarify his message.
I didn’t hear Costas’ first interview segment, but I heard the second, and he essentially wanted to clarify his comments to make sure listeners didn’t take his downplaying of the 600th home run to be confused with Costas’ regard for Rodriguez’s overall baseball accomplishments and career.
What Costas said in the second interview isn’t the point. The point is, you are not Bob Costas, and if you do a media interview, there are typically no second chances to fine tune your message. The pressure is on all of us who do media interviews, or who prepare clients for media interviews, to get it right the first time.
This underscores the value of media training for anyone who is going to participate in media interviews.
We’ve done a significant amount of media training over the years and the number one benefit of this training to participants is that it makes them more comfortable with the process of a media interview. It takes away the “unknown” factor and empowers them to understand that a media interview is about much more than them submitting passively to a list of questions.
During media training, participants also practice their new found interviewing skills under life-like circumstances….cameras rolling, pressure on. It’s one thing to write message points on a piece of paper, it’s another to deliver them succinctly during an interview…just ask Bob Costas. He does this every day for a living, and doesn’t always get his message right the first time.
Interviewing with the media is just like any professional skill. The more you practice, and the more you do, the better you become. Earlier this week, on behalf of our client Experience Works, we helped introduce 101-year-old Sally Gordon to the world as the female recipient of America’s Outstanding Oldest Worker for 2010.
During the course of her life, especially lately, Sally has gained a lot of experience speaking with the media and the public. It’s this practice and experience that makes her expert at delivering that memorable quote such as the one that made it nationwide this week, including the print edition of USA Today. Said Sally, “I used to be a model. Now I feel like a model T.”
For the record, we did not media train or prepare Sally for her interviews. She’s been preparing for this for a century.
But, as with many things, Sally is the exception rather than the rule. If you have people in your organization speaking with the media, they should be trained and they should prepare for each and every interview.
