Monday Morning Media Minute

One of the most common mistakes people make when talking to reporters is trying to say too much. It happens in a couple ways:

Too many messages: If you have more than three messages for an interview, you’re not focused enough. You won’t get more than three messages into a story. Usually, you’ll be doing good to get one or two messages into the story. If you throw too many messages at a reporter, s/he may choose one of the ones you don’t care about. And no one, including the reporter, will remember them all. Say too much and your message will get lost.

You should have a primary message — your “headline” — and at most two secondary messages. Focus on your headline. That’s the one thing you want the reporter to hear if s/he misses or ignores everything else you say and the one thing you want people who see the story to hear, understand and remember.

Opening too many doors: I like to think of interviews as happening in a room with a lot of doors. Your job is to open the door that leads to your story. Every time you answer a question, you potentially open another door. If you open too many doors, the reporter may find a find a more interesting story behind one of them than the one you want to tell. Try not to open any doors except the one that leads to your story. Then make it interesting enough that the reporter will be willing to stay there.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours? Next week: More mistakes people make during interviews.

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

Preparation is the key to successful media interviews. That’s a message I’ve preached for years in media training and conversations with clients. But can you be over prepared? And, if so, what does that look like?

As I see it, the issue is being misprepared rather than over prepared. There was a time when I told media training clients that if a reporter asks you what day of the week it is, you shouldn’t just say it’s Monday; you should also work your message into your answer.

In fact, a lot of media trainers will tell you that. And sometimes you should. If you’re doing a one or two minute live broadcast interview, you need to get to your message right out of the starting gate or you probably won’t get to it at all.

Even if you’re doing a taped interview, you may only get one soundbite into the story. If that’s likely to happen, you’ll want to get your message into every answer, if you can, because only one of your answers — or part of one of your answers — will make it into the story.

But most of the time, there’s more give and take than that during an interview.

Being well prepared means you’ll be able to deliver your message clearly — and make it interesting enough to get into the story. But overselling your message can be as bad as not having a clear message. If you oversell your message, you’ll lose credibility and likeability. Instead of selling your message, you may have exactly the opposite effect. You’ll be like any other salesperson who doesn’t know when to back off.

So, be prepared to deliver your message whenever you can. But be realistic about it. And don’t oversell your story.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours? Next week: More mistakes people make during interviews.

I’ve always thought of Tim Russert as a perfect example of why media training is so important.

Russert always prepared for his interviews. He prepared for Meet the Press by researching the positions of his guests and then taking the opposite side with his questions. His goal was to elicit information while pressing his guests hard enough to expose weaknesses or contradictions in their positions.

Successful media interviews come from good preparation — knowing what your message is and delivering it clearly enough to be heard, understood and remembered. You also have to know what your vulnerabilities are and how you’ll deal with them.

Tim Russert was an exceptional journalist. You won’t run into many like him. But if you prepare for a Tim Russert, you’ll be ready for whoever is asking the questions.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

I love movies and plays. The best ones feel spontaneous because the actors have practiced their lines and moves so many times that they feel unscripted.

Follow their example.  Once you’ve defined your message, practice it until you can say it verbatim without sounding scripted.

Actors follow a script and rehearse. Musicians follow a script and rehearse. Dancers follow a script and rehearse. Professional speakers follow a script and rehearse.

You can follow a script and rehearse, too.  During media training, we sometimes develop messages as a group for the practice interviews that follow.  Sometimes we’ll spend more than an hour developing messages and honing them until each one is a simple statement that can be repeated in a few seconds.  Then, we write them on big sheets of paper and paste them on the wall where the people being interviewed can read them.

More often than not, the participants don’t say the message they helped to write the way it’s written on the wall the first time through.  Instead, they paraphrase what’s on the wall to sound natural.  Inevitably, the paraphrased version isn’t as good.  If it’s better than the one on the wall, we change what’s on the wall.

Following a script is hard until you’ve done it a few times because it feels scripted and rehearsed.  But if you do it right, the scripted version is your best version of what you want to say. So, say it that way. How do you make it sound spontaneous and unrehearsed?  By rehearsing it until it sounds spontaneous and unrehearsed.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

As a spokesperson, are you paid to lie for your boss? Do you find it necessary to lie to your boss? And how strong an obligation do you have to keep your boss’s secrets secret?

Those are some of the questions raised by Scott McClellan’s new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

Question 1: Are you paid to lie for your boss?

Here’s how CNN’s Anderson Cooper put it last week during a discussion of McClellan’s book: “Don’t these people lie all the time? Maybe lying is too dirty a word, but their job, they’re PR people, their job is to spin a story. Their job is to focus on one thing in answering a question and completely ignore the question you ask.”

And here’s how CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen said it: “Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.” He was ridiculing the Public Relations Society of America and others for suggesting McClellan may have violated the ethics of the PR profession by lying for his former bosses at the White House. Suggesting that telling the truth is an ethical obligation for PR people “strikes me as if the Burglars Association of America had as its creed ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal,’” Cohen said.

Cooper and Cohen aren’t alone in feeling those of us who work in public relations are paid to lie for our clients.

During the 20 years I worked in newsrooms and through much of my 25-year career in public relations, I would have told you one of my strengths is that I speak “the truth.” What I’ve come to understand is that I do my best to speak my truth as well as I can. And professionally I do the best I can to help my clients speak their truth.

People see things differently. And we’re entitled to present our point of view without having to make the case for the other side. When I’m representing my clients, I’m obligated to represent their point of view. That’s what they hire me to do. And I’ve taken their money with the understanding I’ll do my best to help them tell their story.

That doesn’t mean I have to lie or mislead by verbally dancing on the head of a pin with tortured interpretations of what the meaning of “is” is. In fact, I’d be doing my clients a disservice if I did.

My experience has been that good clients are at least as careful with the truth as any journalist I’ve met. And any client who expects you to lie or mislead on their behalf isn’t worth having. Keeping your integrity is intact is important. But you don’t have to put it in those terms. If you lie or mislead, sooner or later you’ll lose your credibility and your effectiveness

Did Scott McClellan lie for his bosses at the White House? I can’t say for sure, of course. But I believe he did. Did he tell “the truth” in his book? No. But he probably told his truth as he now sees it.

Does his book serve the national interest by pulling back the curtain of secrecy at the Bush White House? Maybe. I’ll leave that for others to decide.

But one thing his book has done is reinforce the stereotype that people like me regularly lie as a matter of course because it’s part of our job description. And that means he did all of us who practice public relations a disservice. He made it harder for us to do our jobs.

Question 2: Do you find it necessary to lie to your boss?

One of the most important — and difficult — things a good public relations professional can do for clients is give them advice they don’t want to hear. Over the years, I’ve seen too many of my colleagues who aren’t willing to do that. They tell their clients only what the clients want to hear.

I’m not providing a client full value for their money if I’m not willing to be honest enough to give them my best advice, even when I know they won’t like it. There are two caveats:

• My job is to advise the client. But, ultimately the client gets to decide what to do. My job is to do what s/he wants, even if I think s/he should do it differently. If I feel strongly enough that the course of action the client has decided to take is unethical or will require me to do something I’m simply not willing to do, then I have a responsibility to quit.

• If I know a client isn’t open to advice, I don’t give it unless asked. I do the best I can for them under those circumstances. And if I find I can’t do good work for them, it’s time to leave.

By his own admission, Scott McClellan reached a point where he no longer believed in what he was doing at the White House. He was lying for and to his bosses. He says he ultimately resigned because of that. Did he wait too long to resign? I don’t know. But the fact that he waited as long as he did to quit and waited until he had a book to sell to speak out will inevitably hurt the credibility of his message.

Question 3: How strong an obligation do you have to keep your boss’s secrets secret?

I see my obligation to honor the confidences of my clients as equivalent to the obligations attorneys, priests, therapists, doctors and similar professionals have to honor the confidences of their clients, parishioners or patients. With his book, McClellan has violated this trust.

The impact? Steve Lang, a former colleague and retired vice president of external communication for AT&T Broadband (now Comcast) said it well in an email to me last week. Steve says McClellan “has dealt a blow to PR people everywhere. One of the toughest parts of the PR job is gaining the trust of upper management, and gaining access to the decision-making process in order to be that voice of the public inside the company. Well, that just got harder, thanks to little Scotty.” I agree.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.