Monday Morning Media Minute

By now, most of us know who Michael Phelps is.  But what about Jason Lezak, Peter Vanderkaay and Ryan Lochte?

Among them, Lezak, Vanderkaay and Lochte won five gold and four bronze medals at the Beijing Olympics.  But most of us wouldn’t recognize their names.

Lezak’s come-from-behind anchor leg in the men’s 400-meter freestyle relay “saved” one of the eight gold medals Phelps took home from China.  Lochte won individual gold and bronze medals in races that were just 27 minutes apart.

And who can forget Phelps’ amazing finish in the 100-meter butterfly where he beat out Serbia’s Milorad Cavic by one one-hundredth of a second – less time that it took me to type any single character in this Media Minute.

Cavic appeared to have the race won.  But he eased into the finish while Phelps made one last lunge to win.  Seven golds and one silver, impressive as that would have been, isn’t the same as eight golds.  Cavic will always be known, to the degree he’s known at all, as the swimmer who almost beat Phelps.

What’s my point?

Just over 300 gold medals were awarded during the 16 days of the Beijing Olympics.  Some reporters received that many story pitches over those same 16 days.

Most Olympic athletes go home without a gold medal — or any medal at all.  Most news releases end up in the junk pile of the Recycle Bins of newsroom computers.

Getting your story told is the equivalent of winning a gold medal — or at least a bronze.  Getting it widely noticed takes the equivalent of Michael Phelps’ eight golds.

Phelps won his eight gold medals in part because he’s a phenomenal athlete.  You need a good story to get the media to tell yours.

But Phelps also won at least two of his gold medals — the butterfly race against Cavic and the relay Lezak came from behind to win — because Phelps and his teammates wanted to win just a little bit more than their competitors.  Reporters pass up a lot of good stories for other stories that are just a little bit better — or the person pitching them tried just a little harder.

I see a lot of news releases that someone decided were “good enough” to send to the media.  But good enough isn’t always good enough if you want your story to be heard, understood and remembered.

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 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

Are you passing up opportunities to tell your story because you’re afraid the positive story you want to tell will turn negative?

Any story, no matter how positive, can go into the ditch. So, it’s important to consider the potential negative consequences before pitching a story to the media. But don’t be so afraid of the negatives that you don’t tell your story — because if you don’t tell your story no one else will.

There are times when the risks of ending up with a negative story are high enough to skip the pitch.  But my experience is that clients often talk themselves out of telling their story because of what I call the what-if-the-sun-rises-in-the-west syndrome.  They talk themselves out of telling their story by “what iffing” it to death.  In fact, sometimes it seems like the more potential a story has for making a big impact the more likely it is that someone will argue against telling it.

And the “negatives” can be self-fulfilling.  We once succeeded after several weeks of hard work in selling a reporter on writing a major story that got excellent placement, with a headline and lead that were perfect.  As I was enjoying the article, my phone rang.  It was our client, upset because there was a minor factual error deep into the story — something that didn’t really matter.  He wanted me to call the reporter and demand a correction.  He was so focused on the factual mistake that he totally lost sight of the fact that the story was a huge plus.  All he could see was the mistake that no one but us would even notice.

With that experience (and others like it) in mind, I’d love to know whether the leaders of China feel good about the news coverage of the current Olympics.  They should.  But I’m willing to bet that somewhere in Beijing at least a few Chinese leaders are fretting about the negative publicity that’s gone along with all the good.  And, if I’m right, they have no idea just how positive the Olympics coverage has been.

Nobody will tell your story if you don’t.  More often than not, you can’t tell it without taking a few hits with it.  The question is:  Do the positives outweigh the negatives.  If so, that’s a win.

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 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.

Last week I listed eight common interview mistakes.  Here are eight things you can do to make your interviews more successful:

1. Have a clear objective: Know what you want to happen as a result of talking to this reporter.  A “positive” story isn’t specific enough.  Why are you talking to this reporter?
2. Have a clear message: Be able to repeat it in 15 seconds or less.  Not because of soundbites (most of them are shorter than that), but because if you can’t say your message in 15 seconds or less you haven’t made it simple enough and clear enough for the rest of us to hear it, understand it and remember it.
3. Talk to your audience: Everybody’s favorite subject is me.  Know what you want to accomplish, but talk about it in terms your audience will care about.  I’m less interested in a story about you than I am in a story that’s useful to me.
4. Be responsive: Answer the reporter’s questions unless there’s a good reason why you can’t — the answer’s confidential or you don’t know the answer, for example.
5. Be honest: Real honesty involves some transparency.  Saying things that are literally true, but misleading, isn’t being honest.  You probably don’t want to share your deepest, darkest secrets with reporters.  But sometimes conceding a small, obvious flaw buys you more credibility for the points you really care about.
6. Be yourself: What you say is important.  How you say it is, too.  You don’t have to be “polished” or a great orator as long as you’re believable and likable.  For most people that means being yourself.
7. Get to the point: Deliver your punch line first, then add the supporting details.  Building to a conclusion usually isn’t a good idea when talking to reporters.  Start with your message and then tell me why.
8. Stick to the point: Be responsive to the reporter’s questions.  But come back to your message every chance you get.

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 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.

Interviews are the most important tool for telling your story to the media.  And the most dangerous.  For the past few weeks, I’ve been discussing some of the most common mistakes people make during interviews.  Here’s a list summarizing eight of the most common ones:

1. Being unprepared:  Without question, the most common mistake people make when talking to reporters.  Sometimes it’s because they’re overconfident – executives who are good speakers and think they can wing it, for example.  Sometimes it comes from not realizing the importance of being prepared.  And sometimes it happens because the person being interviewed doesn’t know what s/he wants to say.  You should know what your objective is (why you’re talking to the reporter), who your audience is and what your message is before beginning any interview.
2. Overselling the story:  Reporters interview people every day who oversell their stories by being too optimistic and refusing to acknowledge obvious problems.  Think about the people you know who do that when talking to you.  You don’t believe them.  Reporters won’t believe you, either, if you oversell your story.  Do it too often and your credibility will be ruined for good.
3. Saying too much:  If you have more than three messages (including one primary one) for any given interview, you aren’t focused enough.  Throw too many messages at a reporter and the one you care about may not be the one that ends up in the story.  And failing to stick to your message is a formula for saying things you shouldn’t.
4. Saying too little:  There are times when it’s perfectly okay to remain silent when reporters want to talk to you. But when the public health and safety are at stake, you’ll be expected to disclose information and answer reporters’ questions.  The stronger reporters and the public feel that you owe them an answer, the more likely you are to pay a price for remaining silent or limiting what you say.
5. Speaking hypothetically:  Reporters love to ask hypothetical questions to get people to say more than they should.  Any time a reporter asks you a question that includes a variation of “what if,” alarm bells should go off in your head.  Don’t speculate or respond to the hypothetical scenario described by the reporter.  Stick to facts you know.
6. No line in the sand:  If you change your position on a topic or situation to fit what’s convenient on any given day reporters will learn to distrust you.  Be consistent in speaking your truth, even if that feels inconvenient at times.
7. Being combative:  We’ve all seen news stories where the person being interviewed becomes angry and argumentative.  Have you ever seen one where the person being combative won the argument?  Me, neither.
8. Being dishonest:  As obvious as it is, it requires repeating.  You’re entitled to a point of view and to make the case for your point of view.  Most reporters won’t fault you for that.  They will fault you for being dishonest.  Being dishonest includes being misleading by saying something that may be “true” but is designed to mislead.  One lie can destroy your credibility forever.

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 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.

Don’t let the facts get in the way of your story.

Every good storyteller follows this rule.  So should you.  No, I’m not suggesting you play fast and loose with the truth.  Far from it.

This is about boiling your story down to its essence.

You don’t memorize the morning newspaper or the evening news.  Your audience won’t memorize what you say, either.

One of the most common mistakes people make when talking to reporters is sharing too much information.  Most of the time, too many details will blur your message — the real nuggets of what you have to say.

Assume reporters will ignore 98 percent of what you say and everyone else will forget 98 percent of what you say.  Focus on the two percent that matters.

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.

What if you could rule the universe for a day, with your every whim coming true? Would you end world poverty? Bring peace to the Middle East? Give yourself a trillion dollars? All that and more?

A fun parlor game, perhaps. But if it’s a question from a reporter, beware. Any time a reporter asks you any question with “what if” or some variation in it an alarm bell should go off in your head.

Reporters use hypothetical questions a lot. Almost always, they do it to get people to say things they wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — say otherwise.

The problem? A reporter can ask a hypothetical question in a way that the only logical answer is the one s/he wants you give: “If the toxic chemicals stored in your building got into that river over there, would that be bad for people living downstream in Podunk?” Well, yes it would. And if you answer the question as asked to say there’s a hypothetical threat you may find yourself being quoted as saying the chemicals stored in your building are a real threat to people living in Podunk – even if you know there’s no way those chemicals can get into that river and there’s no real threat.

Reporters on deadline frequently ask hypothetical questions during the early stages of a breaking story when there are few hard facts available. They need to write a story or go on the air with a live report. That’s hard to do if you don’t have anything to say. So, they look for someone who’ll speculate. If the speculation turns out to be wrong, it’s your mistake — not theirs.

Here’s my recommendation: Don’t answer hypothetical questions. If a reporter asks you a hypothetical question, either tell the reporter you can’t speculate on hypothetical situations or restrict your answer to what you know — even if that’s little or nothing. And stand your ground. It’s almost always a mistake to speculate for the benefit of reporters looking for a story.

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.

Just as you can say too much when talking to reporters (see last week’s Media Minute), you can also say too little.

There are times when you don’t want to say anything. And, despite some media trainers who claim you should never say “no comment,” sometimes no comment is a perfectly acceptable answer. In fact, sometimes it’s your only sensible answer.

Reporters are fond of referring to the “public’s right to know.” And serving our collective right to know is what makes being a reporter a worthy profession. But the public doesn’t always have a right to know.

For example, if you work for a company with publicly traded stock, you can’t give previously undisclosed material information to a reporter without issuing a news release disclosing the same information to everyone else. Some information’s private – personal medical information and personnel information, for example. Some information’s propriety. And some things simply aren’t anyone else’s business.

If it’s okay to say nothing, how can you say too little?

There’s a simple rule of thumb I’ve found works almost every time: How strongly will reporters and the people who see their stories feel that you owe them a response? The stronger they’ll feel about that, the more likely you are to pay a price for remaining silent or limiting what you say.

If the public health and safety are at stake, you’ll be expected to respond to reporters’ questions – or even volunteer information without being asked. And you’ll be expected to tell everything you know if it’s information the rest of us believe we need to know it.

Another rule of thumb: Answer a reporter’s question unless you have a legitimate reason not to – it’s propriety or private, for example. And it’s generally a good idea to give your reason for not responding if you’re not going to answer the question.

That 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.

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.

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.